happy new year! now get the hell out of my house...!
Ok, I know it's the holidays and it's all about family togetherness and all that, but.... seriously... everyone needs to get the fuck out of here and go home or to school or wherever else they usually are, because I'm really tired of PEOPLE.
Friday, December 29
Thursday, December 28
Monday, December 25
Sunday, December 24
to celebrate jesus's (metaphorical) birth...
Tonight my wife has decided that she wants to attend Church at our old UU congregation at 7:30 and then bring the kids hoome and put them to bed, after which she will head to a midnight mass with her parents at the Catholic Church nearby.
I dunno... I think the only thing worse than being a "C&E Catholic" may be a "C&E Unitarian"!
Sorry - "S&E Unitarian". **
Maybe we'll sing some of my favorite Unitarian Christmas Hymns like "O Come, All Ye Doubtful" or "God Rest Ye Merry Gentleman, Women, and Transgendered Individuals" or perhaps "Angels Some Claim To Have Heard on High". That one's always particularly moving.
Anyway... Merry (insert-festive-december-occasion-here) everyone!
(**"Solstice and Equinox")
Tonight my wife has decided that she wants to attend Church at our old UU congregation at 7:30 and then bring the kids hoome and put them to bed, after which she will head to a midnight mass with her parents at the Catholic Church nearby.
I dunno... I think the only thing worse than being a "C&E Catholic" may be a "C&E Unitarian"!
Sorry - "S&E Unitarian". **
Maybe we'll sing some of my favorite Unitarian Christmas Hymns like "O Come, All Ye Doubtful" or "God Rest Ye Merry Gentleman, Women, and Transgendered Individuals" or perhaps "Angels Some Claim To Have Heard on High". That one's always particularly moving.
Anyway... Merry (insert-festive-december-occasion-here) everyone!
(**"Solstice and Equinox")
Saturday, December 23
and it shook when he laughed, like a bowl full of e. coli...
I have no idea where it came from or what caused it, but while the rest of the family was having dinner last night, I was slumped on the bathroom floor, praying for the sweet relief of death.
I'm feeling better now.
Have I mentioned how great this Xmas season is going so far?
I have no idea where it came from or what caused it, but while the rest of the family was having dinner last night, I was slumped on the bathroom floor, praying for the sweet relief of death.
I'm feeling better now.
Have I mentioned how great this Xmas season is going so far?
Thursday, December 21
someone kill me now...
Well, we've been cleaning all day as my wife's parents are arriving this afternoon and staying until the 29th.
This morning my Mom called to let me know their plans for their traditional post-holiday visit. The date they are arriving?
Yeah. The 29th.
Someone is going to flip out before New Year's Day, I can guarantee it.
Well, we've been cleaning all day as my wife's parents are arriving this afternoon and staying until the 29th.
This morning my Mom called to let me know their plans for their traditional post-holiday visit. The date they are arriving?
Yeah. The 29th.
Someone is going to flip out before New Year's Day, I can guarantee it.
Wednesday, December 20
if it weren't for those meddling kids...
I just noticed for the first time this year that my youngest child's birth coincides with the anniversary of the death of Carl Sagan. It's probably a good thing I noticed it after the fact, or the temptation to name him "Carl" (or heck, even "Sagan") would have been difficult to resist.
It's nearly impossible to overstate the impact the Carl Sagan and his series "Cosmos" had in cementing my career path as a scientist. I would have been 11 when "Cosmos" first aired on PBS, although I'm not sure I caught it on its first run. It seems to me I was a middle schooler, 7th grade perhaps, which means I may have caught the series re-aired a year or so later. I had been a science nerd since the first grade, of course... checking out astronomy and dinosaur books from the school library against constant protests and nagging from the school Librarian to check out some fiction stories now and then. (From time to time I'd pick out something from the stacks to humor her, then drop it in the "return" slot on the way out the door.)
So even though I already knew much of the science being presented by Dr. Sagan in "Cosmos" by the time I was 12, I remember the feeling that what I was seeing was important somehow. I had to see this, because this was what I was going to do. I watched the whole series on the black and white console TV in the back living-room, so as not to interrupt my Mom's viewings of M*A*S*H and what have you on the color cable TV in the family room. "Are you watching that boring show again?" she'd ask. Watching the DVD boxed set nowadays, the experience seems somehow inauthentic without the omnipresent UHF static.
When I found out there was a Carl Sagan Memorial Blog-A-Thon and the celebrating Sagan website, I knew I wanted to tell one story in particular - the story of my own moment of "contact" with Dr. Sagan himself. It happened around the time of the publication of his book "The Demon Haunted Word" - his call for rationality in an irrational time. At one point in the book, he is discussing how rare skepticism and rational investigation are in modern discourse, and he points out that, for example, there has never been a regular television show devoted to investigating claims of the paranormal and supernatural and revealing them to be explicable, mundane, or simply hoaxes. I had a quick and amusing realization that Sagan had missed something here, and that there was one program which actually fit the bill nicely... "Scooby Doo" - in which all manner of phantoms, spectres, and ghosts are revealed to be nothing more than an old man in a rubber mask. The realization made me chuckle and it occurred to my that Dr. Sagan probably had enough of a sense of humor to get a kick out of the observation as well. I typed up a quick letter, and rather than mail it to his publisher or publicist, I faxed it to the his departmental office at Cornell. (These were still the days before email!) I also added a sentence at the end explaining that I was getting my BS in physics and thanking him for the influence that "Cosmos" had on my decision to become a scientist and science educator. I didn't really expect a response, but to my surprise, a few months later, I received an envelope in the mail from Cornell. (I've spent an hour trying to dig up the actual letter, which I still have tucked away in a keepsake-box SOMEWHERE in this house.) In the letter, Dr. Sagan thanked me warmly for pointing out the oversight, saying that he was embarrassed not to have thought of it himself, given that he's watched the show many times with his young children. He even promised to add a footnote in future editions of the book holding up the Scooby-Doo kids as a model for healthy skepticism in the face of the seemingly supernatural.
Of course, the revised 2nd edition of "Demon Haunted World" never came to pass, and Carl Sagan died a few years later in 1996. I found out about his passing from an airport television tuned to CNN as I was traveling alone to a scientific conference.
It was with a mixture of pleasure and sadness that I picked up Carl Sagan's new book, "The Varieties of Scientific Experience" last month in a bookstore. It would have been easy to dismiss it as a cheap effort to make a few bucks by cobbling together a few lectures into a posthumous work whose narrower-than-usual profile was a pretty clear indication that there was not that much IN there. And yet it was so good to hear Sagan's "voice" again that I couldn't help but read it with a smile. Especially since I hear so much of his voice in my own, as I teach today. Not so much the sound of his voice, which would be foolish to try to replicate, but something of the cadence... the patterns of pauses and emphasis. I even catch myself taking on Carl's signature habit of surrounding the word "billion", a word which you get to say a lot as an astronomy professor, with a little bit of space before and after... four hundred -billion- stars... a -billion- light years... thirteen -billion- years old... The pause places the word in a tiny space of its own, emphasizing its vastness. I don't do it on purpose, but I wouldn't blame me if I did.
Hell, I even have the jacket...
I just noticed for the first time this year that my youngest child's birth coincides with the anniversary of the death of Carl Sagan. It's probably a good thing I noticed it after the fact, or the temptation to name him "Carl" (or heck, even "Sagan") would have been difficult to resist.
It's nearly impossible to overstate the impact the Carl Sagan and his series "Cosmos" had in cementing my career path as a scientist. I would have been 11 when "Cosmos" first aired on PBS, although I'm not sure I caught it on its first run. It seems to me I was a middle schooler, 7th grade perhaps, which means I may have caught the series re-aired a year or so later. I had been a science nerd since the first grade, of course... checking out astronomy and dinosaur books from the school library against constant protests and nagging from the school Librarian to check out some fiction stories now and then. (From time to time I'd pick out something from the stacks to humor her, then drop it in the "return" slot on the way out the door.)
So even though I already knew much of the science being presented by Dr. Sagan in "Cosmos" by the time I was 12, I remember the feeling that what I was seeing was important somehow. I had to see this, because this was what I was going to do. I watched the whole series on the black and white console TV in the back living-room, so as not to interrupt my Mom's viewings of M*A*S*H and what have you on the color cable TV in the family room. "Are you watching that boring show again?" she'd ask. Watching the DVD boxed set nowadays, the experience seems somehow inauthentic without the omnipresent UHF static.
When I found out there was a Carl Sagan Memorial Blog-A-Thon and the celebrating Sagan website, I knew I wanted to tell one story in particular - the story of my own moment of "contact" with Dr. Sagan himself. It happened around the time of the publication of his book "The Demon Haunted Word" - his call for rationality in an irrational time. At one point in the book, he is discussing how rare skepticism and rational investigation are in modern discourse, and he points out that, for example, there has never been a regular television show devoted to investigating claims of the paranormal and supernatural and revealing them to be explicable, mundane, or simply hoaxes. I had a quick and amusing realization that Sagan had missed something here, and that there was one program which actually fit the bill nicely... "Scooby Doo" - in which all manner of phantoms, spectres, and ghosts are revealed to be nothing more than an old man in a rubber mask. The realization made me chuckle and it occurred to my that Dr. Sagan probably had enough of a sense of humor to get a kick out of the observation as well. I typed up a quick letter, and rather than mail it to his publisher or publicist, I faxed it to the his departmental office at Cornell. (These were still the days before email!) I also added a sentence at the end explaining that I was getting my BS in physics and thanking him for the influence that "Cosmos" had on my decision to become a scientist and science educator. I didn't really expect a response, but to my surprise, a few months later, I received an envelope in the mail from Cornell. (I've spent an hour trying to dig up the actual letter, which I still have tucked away in a keepsake-box SOMEWHERE in this house.) In the letter, Dr. Sagan thanked me warmly for pointing out the oversight, saying that he was embarrassed not to have thought of it himself, given that he's watched the show many times with his young children. He even promised to add a footnote in future editions of the book holding up the Scooby-Doo kids as a model for healthy skepticism in the face of the seemingly supernatural.
Of course, the revised 2nd edition of "Demon Haunted World" never came to pass, and Carl Sagan died a few years later in 1996. I found out about his passing from an airport television tuned to CNN as I was traveling alone to a scientific conference.
It was with a mixture of pleasure and sadness that I picked up Carl Sagan's new book, "The Varieties of Scientific Experience" last month in a bookstore. It would have been easy to dismiss it as a cheap effort to make a few bucks by cobbling together a few lectures into a posthumous work whose narrower-than-usual profile was a pretty clear indication that there was not that much IN there. And yet it was so good to hear Sagan's "voice" again that I couldn't help but read it with a smile. Especially since I hear so much of his voice in my own, as I teach today. Not so much the sound of his voice, which would be foolish to try to replicate, but something of the cadence... the patterns of pauses and emphasis. I even catch myself taking on Carl's signature habit of surrounding the word "billion", a word which you get to say a lot as an astronomy professor, with a little bit of space before and after... four hundred -billion- stars... a -billion- light years... thirteen -billion- years old... The pause places the word in a tiny space of its own, emphasizing its vastness. I don't do it on purpose, but I wouldn't blame me if I did.
Hell, I even have the jacket...
Tuesday, December 19
last exam...
I'm in the middle of it right now. (One of my favorite things! Look at them scribble away!) So, this is it for me. I'm not coming back to campus until after the new year. I still have a mountain of grading to do, but... the semester is now officially OVER.
Aah, the periodic finality of academia. It can't be beat.
I'm in the middle of it right now. (One of my favorite things! Look at them scribble away!) So, this is it for me. I'm not coming back to campus until after the new year. I still have a mountain of grading to do, but... the semester is now officially OVER.
Aah, the periodic finality of academia. It can't be beat.
seems obvious...
I won't detail the events that led me to this consideration but... Why doesn't Post-it make a glue stick? Like... their patented weak-ass semi-sticky glue in stick form that you could smear on any piece of paper... wait a minute or two for it to dry, then... just like that, you've made anything you want into a big Post-it.
I can't imagine there are any huge technological obstacles to this. Someone must have thought of it before me, right?
-------
PS> Well, i'll be god-damned. Why wasn't I told? Has the Nobel Prize committee heard about this??
I won't detail the events that led me to this consideration but... Why doesn't Post-it make a glue stick? Like... their patented weak-ass semi-sticky glue in stick form that you could smear on any piece of paper... wait a minute or two for it to dry, then... just like that, you've made anything you want into a big Post-it.
I can't imagine there are any huge technological obstacles to this. Someone must have thought of it before me, right?
-------
PS> Well, i'll be god-damned. Why wasn't I told? Has the Nobel Prize committee heard about this??
Monday, December 18
don we now our gay apparel...
Tonight is the faculty Xmas party, so this is going to be a looooooong day. I really have no idea when I'll be trying to get home. The trains get pretty scarce after 8:00 PM, and the party doesn't start until 7:00. I'm thinking there is something 9:30-ish I could probably catch. I'd really rather not take that train that gets home at 1:50.
But in honor of the festivities, I'm wearing my black pants and black/purple striped shirt to go with my new velvet blazer. (See subject line.) Actually TWO new black velvet blazers, since I picked up one this weekend that fits a little better and I need to take the first one back. They are cut ridiculously small. I usually wear a 42 regular in off-the-rack sportscoats, but I could barely move by arms in a 42R, so I went all the way up to a 46R to get the arms to fit. It was a little too long in the waist, but not ridiculously so. But when I went back the other day, they had a 44L that fits better. So, the one in the closet goes back. Eventually.
(I have officially been married to my wife TOO LONG.)
I was hoping for a relaxing train ride today. I'm giving one final exam, which is already written and ready to print, and I'm doing a review session for Astronomy. So I figured I had nothing to prepare for... maybe I could even grade a few papers. But then I remembered I have one Astro student who needs to take the exam early. So I have to write that exam this morning. Fuck.
The weekend was full of shopping fun. I ran all over Saturday afternoon and again Saturday night, with only marginal success. (Grandmom and Dad done, brother almost done, Mom nothing.) Then on Sunday we took the kids to the mall to get their pictures taken in the matching sweaters my wife knitted (insane!) for them. Then on the way home we got a flat tire on the van, which I had to change in a gas station parking lot. At least it wasn't on the highway!! Merry Christmas!!
Anyway, there is other stuff going on today, but I really need to get to that exam, so...
Tonight is the faculty Xmas party, so this is going to be a looooooong day. I really have no idea when I'll be trying to get home. The trains get pretty scarce after 8:00 PM, and the party doesn't start until 7:00. I'm thinking there is something 9:30-ish I could probably catch. I'd really rather not take that train that gets home at 1:50.
But in honor of the festivities, I'm wearing my black pants and black/purple striped shirt to go with my new velvet blazer. (See subject line.) Actually TWO new black velvet blazers, since I picked up one this weekend that fits a little better and I need to take the first one back. They are cut ridiculously small. I usually wear a 42 regular in off-the-rack sportscoats, but I could barely move by arms in a 42R, so I went all the way up to a 46R to get the arms to fit. It was a little too long in the waist, but not ridiculously so. But when I went back the other day, they had a 44L that fits better. So, the one in the closet goes back. Eventually.
(I have officially been married to my wife TOO LONG.)
I was hoping for a relaxing train ride today. I'm giving one final exam, which is already written and ready to print, and I'm doing a review session for Astronomy. So I figured I had nothing to prepare for... maybe I could even grade a few papers. But then I remembered I have one Astro student who needs to take the exam early. So I have to write that exam this morning. Fuck.
The weekend was full of shopping fun. I ran all over Saturday afternoon and again Saturday night, with only marginal success. (Grandmom and Dad done, brother almost done, Mom nothing.) Then on Sunday we took the kids to the mall to get their pictures taken in the matching sweaters my wife knitted (insane!) for them. Then on the way home we got a flat tire on the van, which I had to change in a gas station parking lot. At least it wasn't on the highway!! Merry Christmas!!
Anyway, there is other stuff going on today, but I really need to get to that exam, so...
Thursday, December 14
I couldn't be more proud...
I got this email from my wife this morning, recounting a conversation between my 7 year old daughter (K) and the 9-year old girl across the street (M) over breakfast this morning.
K (daughter): Did you know that one thousand billion years from now, the Earth is going to explode. It's true. I read it in a book.
M (neighbor): Well, it doesn't matter because God is going to end the world soon. (turns to wife) Do you believe in God?
Wife: Yes.
M: Does she?
Wife: I don't know, you'd have to ask her.
M: Well, have you been saved?
Wife: We believe in a different kind of religion.
M: Well *Christians* --
K: But it's *science* --
Wife: We're Christian, just a different flavor of Christian than you. There are lots of different religions, you know.
M: I know, but when Christians die, they all go to heaven, and ... I don't know what happens next, but I guess I'll see you guys in heaven.
K: Well, the Earth is going to end one thousand billion years from now, but it doesn't matter, because we won't still be alive.
M: Did you know that back in the time of the Bible, people lived for 300 years?
Wife: Some people think that that was just a way of showing respect to people.
M: It's true! It's in the Bible.
K: Sometimes the Bible lies.
Wife, intervening: People believe different things about the Bible. Some people believe it literally, and some people think it's more of a story. Right?
M nods.
Wife: Can we please move on to a different topic??
I got this email from my wife this morning, recounting a conversation between my 7 year old daughter (K) and the 9-year old girl across the street (M) over breakfast this morning.
K (daughter): Did you know that one thousand billion years from now, the Earth is going to explode. It's true. I read it in a book.
M (neighbor): Well, it doesn't matter because God is going to end the world soon. (turns to wife) Do you believe in God?
Wife: Yes.
M: Does she?
Wife: I don't know, you'd have to ask her.
M: Well, have you been saved?
Wife: We believe in a different kind of religion.
M: Well *Christians* --
K: But it's *science* --
Wife: We're Christian, just a different flavor of Christian than you. There are lots of different religions, you know.
M: I know, but when Christians die, they all go to heaven, and ... I don't know what happens next, but I guess I'll see you guys in heaven.
K: Well, the Earth is going to end one thousand billion years from now, but it doesn't matter, because we won't still be alive.
M: Did you know that back in the time of the Bible, people lived for 300 years?
Wife: Some people think that that was just a way of showing respect to people.
M: It's true! It's in the Bible.
K: Sometimes the Bible lies.
Wife, intervening: People believe different things about the Bible. Some people believe it literally, and some people think it's more of a story. Right?
M nods.
Wife: Can we please move on to a different topic??
this is only a test...
Since I had no time to write a blog entry on the train cuz I was writing a final exam instead, I present for your reading pleasure... a final exam on heat and thermodynamics.
Very straighforward... no tricky questions. Anything less than a passing grade on this exam should be cause for shame.
Since I had no time to write a blog entry on the train cuz I was writing a final exam instead, I present for your reading pleasure... a final exam on heat and thermodynamics.
PART ONE: ENERGY
1) What is energy? Give a definition if you can, then list several examples of various kinds of energy.
2) Imagine a car driving down the road at 50 mph. The car has kinetic energy. Where did the car’s kinetic energy come from? Where did THAT energy come from...? Trace the energy of the car all the way back to its origin, through as many transformations as you can.
PART TWO: THEORIES OF HEAT
1) Imagine the following scenario: You make hot cup of tea to help you stay up late and study for your physics final;. The phone rings. You set your hot tea down to go answer the phone. You come back a half hour later to find your tea is now lukewarm. Explain what has just happened in terms of the caloric theory of heat.
2) Now take the same scenario above and explain what has just happened in terms of the kinetic theory of heat.
3) What observations and experiments by Count Rumford led him to reject the idea of ”caloric” ?
4) Describe the experiment conducted by James Joule. What did this experiment demonstrate?
PART THREE: HEAT AND TEMPERATURE
1) What is the difference between heat and temperature?
2) You can safely reach into a 400ºF oven and touch the top of a cake with your finger to test and see if it is “done”. But if your hand touches the rack, or the cake pan, you will be burned. Why is it safe to touch the 400º cake and the 400º air, but not the 400º metal?
3) Suppose you have 1 kilogram of lead and 1 kilogram of water. The lead is heated to a temperature of 180ºC, while the water is at a temperature of 20ºC. The hot lead and the warm water are placed into the same container and allowed to reach equilibrium. Would you expect the final temperature of the water and lead to be…
A) greater than 50º?
B) less than 50º?
C) 50º?
Explain your answer. What additional information would you need to know in order to answer this question exactly?
PART FOUR: The Laws of Thermodynamics
1) State the First Law of Thermodynamics below...
2) State the “Zeroth” Law of Thermodynamics below. Why is this law necessary, and why is it numbered “0” instead of “1”?
3) State the Second Law of Thermodynamics in as many ways as you can. (In terms of entropy, in terms of engines, in terms of heat flow, etc...)
4) State the Third Law of Thermodynamics below…
5) Explain as best you can what physicists mean by the term “entropy”.
PART FIVE: Thermodynamics and Statistical Mechanics
1) Briefly describe the “Maxwell’s Demon” thought-experiment?. What point was James Clerk Maxwell trying to make with his scenario?
2) What are some of the practical and theoretical obstacles to achieving a temperature of "absolute zero"?
Very straighforward... no tricky questions. Anything less than a passing grade on this exam should be cause for shame.
Wednesday, December 13
tivo to-go...
I am currently writing my blog stuff and reading my websites on the train while watching a documentary about Jupiter's moon Europa that I TiVo'd off the science channel and transferred to my laptop.
Yay for TiVo, right? Not quite.
The only reason I was able to do this on a Mac was that the DRM copy-protection used by TiVo was cracked by hackers. Once this happened, it took exactly ONE WEEK for someone to write software for the Mac to handle the transferring and decoding of shows. One week.
I don't want to get into a philosophical argument about DRM and the ethics of breaking such restrictions, my point is this... TiVo has been promising to bring this functionality to the Mac for something like a year and a half. (Windows users have been able to perform these transfers with official TiVo-provided software for quite some time.) And they keep putting us off and putting us off and making excuses... and here, a couple of guys working for free have given us what the company couldn't provide. They should be ashamed of themselves. What will their reaction be? Probably to change the DRM and break the hack that makes their product more useful to a large fraction of their customers. What SHOULD they do? Hire the guys who wrote this software to make official TiVo To Go software available for the Mac in early 2007.
(end rant.)
I am currently writing my blog stuff and reading my websites on the train while watching a documentary about Jupiter's moon Europa that I TiVo'd off the science channel and transferred to my laptop.
Yay for TiVo, right? Not quite.
The only reason I was able to do this on a Mac was that the DRM copy-protection used by TiVo was cracked by hackers. Once this happened, it took exactly ONE WEEK for someone to write software for the Mac to handle the transferring and decoding of shows. One week.
I don't want to get into a philosophical argument about DRM and the ethics of breaking such restrictions, my point is this... TiVo has been promising to bring this functionality to the Mac for something like a year and a half. (Windows users have been able to perform these transfers with official TiVo-provided software for quite some time.) And they keep putting us off and putting us off and making excuses... and here, a couple of guys working for free have given us what the company couldn't provide. They should be ashamed of themselves. What will their reaction be? Probably to change the DRM and break the hack that makes their product more useful to a large fraction of their customers. What SHOULD they do? Hire the guys who wrote this software to make official TiVo To Go software available for the Mac in early 2007.
(end rant.)
so, dr. gong... we meet again...
A student taking a history of music course emailed me asking for help finding resources for a paper she is writing. She wanted to find images of the vibrational modes of a Chinese gong. I checked my acoustics bible ("The Physics of Musical Instruments" by Fletcher and Rossing) but came up empty. So I tried Google.
What do you think you get if you Google "vibrational modes" + "gong"...?
Yeah - you get 1000 hits on Qi Gong healing and 1000 papers on acoustics written by Chinese scientists named "Gong".
Luckily I eventually figured out those things are really called "tam-tams" and hit the jackpot.
A student taking a history of music course emailed me asking for help finding resources for a paper she is writing. She wanted to find images of the vibrational modes of a Chinese gong. I checked my acoustics bible ("The Physics of Musical Instruments" by Fletcher and Rossing) but came up empty. So I tried Google.
What do you think you get if you Google "vibrational modes" + "gong"...?
Yeah - you get 1000 hits on Qi Gong healing and 1000 papers on acoustics written by Chinese scientists named "Gong".
Luckily I eventually figured out those things are really called "tam-tams" and hit the jackpot.
Tuesday, December 12
sleep in heavenly peace...
I feel like a million god damned dollars this morning, and for no other reason than the fact that I turned out the light at 11:08 last night instead of staying up and fucking around until 12:30. Amazing how sleeping makes you, like... NOT TIRED.
Someone should really publicize this connection.
Not only to I not feel sleepy, but I'm in a good MOOD. Which is weird for me, especially during finals week when I have all kinds of crap to do and meetings to go to. I may even grade papers today WITHOUT the accompanying sense of overwhelming dread!
The plan for today... Pull into town on the "late" train. Take the PATH up past my usual stop to 22nd... hit the B&N... pick up "Lisey's Story" and the new Paula Poundstone book for my wife for Xmas... maybe a book for me ("The Road" by Cormac McCarthy... anyone heard of it?) and maybe sit and grade for a little while in the café. Have a cup of tea. Walk down past "The Container Store" and pick up some paper-file-boxes for taking care of some end-of-term organization. Head down to the office. Post these blog entries. Print out a review sheet for the physics final. Print out a follow-up to the diagnostic test I gave them the first day of class. (Ha! They have to take a quiz they don't know about! The day before the final!) Deal with some administrative crappo re: students. Have another cup of tea. Go to class. Chill out for an hour afterwards. Go to a committee meeting. Pretend to be interested. Put together another pile of grading for the train. Sleep on the train instead.
A full day.
I feel like a million god damned dollars this morning, and for no other reason than the fact that I turned out the light at 11:08 last night instead of staying up and fucking around until 12:30. Amazing how sleeping makes you, like... NOT TIRED.
Someone should really publicize this connection.
Not only to I not feel sleepy, but I'm in a good MOOD. Which is weird for me, especially during finals week when I have all kinds of crap to do and meetings to go to. I may even grade papers today WITHOUT the accompanying sense of overwhelming dread!
The plan for today... Pull into town on the "late" train. Take the PATH up past my usual stop to 22nd... hit the B&N... pick up "Lisey's Story" and the new Paula Poundstone book for my wife for Xmas... maybe a book for me ("The Road" by Cormac McCarthy... anyone heard of it?) and maybe sit and grade for a little while in the café. Have a cup of tea. Walk down past "The Container Store" and pick up some paper-file-boxes for taking care of some end-of-term organization. Head down to the office. Post these blog entries. Print out a review sheet for the physics final. Print out a follow-up to the diagnostic test I gave them the first day of class. (Ha! They have to take a quiz they don't know about! The day before the final!) Deal with some administrative crappo re: students. Have another cup of tea. Go to class. Chill out for an hour afterwards. Go to a committee meeting. Pretend to be interested. Put together another pile of grading for the train. Sleep on the train instead.
A full day.
deck the halls with smoke, blood, and broken glass...
My life was nearly claimed by the tiny ceramic Christmas village yesterday when I over-tightened a bulb, causing it to shatter, spark, and burst into flames in my hands. It was quite spectacular. I'm not sure I've ever been cut, burned, and electrocuted simultaneously before.
Merry Christmas everyone!!
My life was nearly claimed by the tiny ceramic Christmas village yesterday when I over-tightened a bulb, causing it to shatter, spark, and burst into flames in my hands. It was quite spectacular. I'm not sure I've ever been cut, burned, and electrocuted simultaneously before.
Merry Christmas everyone!!
the curse of heredity...
My 7 year-old daughter went to her first real eye-doctor appointment yesterday (apart from the in-school screenings of the "ok, you aren't blind" variety) and she was prescribed glasses for reading. It was inevitable, I guess, since both her parents wear glasses, but 7 seems a little early. The weird thing is that she has one eye that is much worse than the other, just like me.
Genetics is just bizarre.
Anyway, she actually seems marginally excited about it. (She picked out purple frames, apparently!) I tried to be upbeat about it when I came home from work yesterday. I told her I bet she would look older... "I bet you'll look EIGHT!". Her response? "I already look eight... it's because I'm in the third grade."
Fine, never mind. Clearly your self-esteem needs no boosting from me.
My 7 year-old daughter went to her first real eye-doctor appointment yesterday (apart from the in-school screenings of the "ok, you aren't blind" variety) and she was prescribed glasses for reading. It was inevitable, I guess, since both her parents wear glasses, but 7 seems a little early. The weird thing is that she has one eye that is much worse than the other, just like me.
Genetics is just bizarre.
Anyway, she actually seems marginally excited about it. (She picked out purple frames, apparently!) I tried to be upbeat about it when I came home from work yesterday. I told her I bet she would look older... "I bet you'll look EIGHT!". Her response? "I already look eight... it's because I'm in the third grade."
Fine, never mind. Clearly your self-esteem needs no boosting from me.
Monday, December 11
deck the halls...
Remember I like a week and a half ago I mentioned that we took the decorations out and bought a tree and started decorating...?
Yeah. We're about halfway done now.
The thing is, my wife insisted on starting this project while she was in the middle of two big work deadlines, so what it amounted to was one half-deocrated tree and a dozen plastic bins full of Xmas crap all opened and half-emptied into the living room. Only yesterday has this situation started to improve slightly. The outside of the house is decorated with lights and wreaths and whatnot, thanks to the purchase of a $180 foldy-extension ladder from Lowes. The absurdly priceless Lenox Nativity is in place in the china cabinet. The artificial tree is set up in the computer room ready to be paper-chained and snowflaked by the kids. (A task which seems to have excited them for all of 10 minutes.) The village is in place but unlit, due to a bad multi-light string that we can't find a replacement for. It's basically still a mess, though. The deadlline for getting the house in shape is this Sunday, which is The Boy's birthday party. Only one person has RSVP'd though. The wife thinks I'm joking when I say we should tell him his birthday is in June. I am not. This is our last chance to make the change before he is old enough to remember.
So... anyway... this is the last week of real learning at school, and also the last chance for administrators to pack in meetings, so... it's going to be a long week in that regard. Late meetings Tuesday and Thursday mean I'm probably going to blow off the University-wide Xmas party on Wednesday. Three late nights in a row is just too much. It sucks, though because it deprives me of a chance to wear my festive(*) new black-velvet blazer. At least I still have the smaller Xmas party for my College. And the wife and I may throw a small Holiday party for some friends and neighbors. Or maybe a New Year's Party. Perhaps an Oscar party. We'll see how things go. You know how Dave loves the parties.
The need to do some grading has grown from "pressing" to "urgent". I have a packet of papers tucked in right next to me here on the train. I dread opening them... the papers are boring as fuck. I don't blame the students, really. I need to learn how to design assignments such that grading them is not torture. Also, the requirements for this paper were kind of fuzzy, so I can't find much reason to reduce anyone's grade. It looks like nearly everyone will get an A or A- on the assignment, which makes me feel like I'm not doing my job.
Anyway. Off to slog through a few of these.
dave
(*) i.e. "gay"
Remember I like a week and a half ago I mentioned that we took the decorations out and bought a tree and started decorating...?
Yeah. We're about halfway done now.
The thing is, my wife insisted on starting this project while she was in the middle of two big work deadlines, so what it amounted to was one half-deocrated tree and a dozen plastic bins full of Xmas crap all opened and half-emptied into the living room. Only yesterday has this situation started to improve slightly. The outside of the house is decorated with lights and wreaths and whatnot, thanks to the purchase of a $180 foldy-extension ladder from Lowes. The absurdly priceless Lenox Nativity is in place in the china cabinet. The artificial tree is set up in the computer room ready to be paper-chained and snowflaked by the kids. (A task which seems to have excited them for all of 10 minutes.) The village is in place but unlit, due to a bad multi-light string that we can't find a replacement for. It's basically still a mess, though. The deadlline for getting the house in shape is this Sunday, which is The Boy's birthday party. Only one person has RSVP'd though. The wife thinks I'm joking when I say we should tell him his birthday is in June. I am not. This is our last chance to make the change before he is old enough to remember.
So... anyway... this is the last week of real learning at school, and also the last chance for administrators to pack in meetings, so... it's going to be a long week in that regard. Late meetings Tuesday and Thursday mean I'm probably going to blow off the University-wide Xmas party on Wednesday. Three late nights in a row is just too much. It sucks, though because it deprives me of a chance to wear my festive(*) new black-velvet blazer. At least I still have the smaller Xmas party for my College. And the wife and I may throw a small Holiday party for some friends and neighbors. Or maybe a New Year's Party. Perhaps an Oscar party. We'll see how things go. You know how Dave loves the parties.
The need to do some grading has grown from "pressing" to "urgent". I have a packet of papers tucked in right next to me here on the train. I dread opening them... the papers are boring as fuck. I don't blame the students, really. I need to learn how to design assignments such that grading them is not torture. Also, the requirements for this paper were kind of fuzzy, so I can't find much reason to reduce anyone's grade. It looks like nearly everyone will get an A or A- on the assignment, which makes me feel like I'm not doing my job.
Anyway. Off to slog through a few of these.
dave
(*) i.e. "gay"
Friday, December 8
Thursday, December 7
absolutely...
Well, today was the last day of new material for the Physics class. We talked about the 3rd law of thermodynamics and the idea of Absolute Zero. Fitting that the semester should end on a topic that describes a state completely devoid of energy.
I think we can all relate.
The thing is, it was a really good class, which was all the more notable for the fact that I've never really devoted an entire lecture to this topic before and I had to put together a new Keynote presentation on the topic. I'm pretty sure you have no idea how rare this is. Most of my presentations are recycled from PowerPoints that I've been using and re-using for 6 years or more. So a new presentation is a very rare and exciting event. I'm quite proud of myself for bothering with such a thing this close to the end of the semester.
And so with that sense of accomplishment firmly in mind, I shall take a nap.
Well, today was the last day of new material for the Physics class. We talked about the 3rd law of thermodynamics and the idea of Absolute Zero. Fitting that the semester should end on a topic that describes a state completely devoid of energy.
I think we can all relate.
The thing is, it was a really good class, which was all the more notable for the fact that I've never really devoted an entire lecture to this topic before and I had to put together a new Keynote presentation on the topic. I'm pretty sure you have no idea how rare this is. Most of my presentations are recycled from PowerPoints that I've been using and re-using for 6 years or more. So a new presentation is a very rare and exciting event. I'm quite proud of myself for bothering with such a thing this close to the end of the semester.
And so with that sense of accomplishment firmly in mind, I shall take a nap.
Tuesday, December 5
smarter than your average slacker...
We got this email from the Dean of our College this morning...
My first reaction was "Oooh! Who is it?!". My second reaction was, "Wait, you mean I could have been coming to class 30 minutes late and just canceling it whenever I want but now the jig is up?!". But I finally realized that these other people are just stupid. If you want to be a slacker, don't come to class a half hour LATE... end class a half hour EARLY. That way, instead of inconveniencing your students, you'll be perceived as doing them a FAVOR. Nobody complains, and you still get just as much time to goof off.
Amateurs...
We got this email from the Dean of our College this morning...
"Dear Colleagues,
This semester many students have complained about professors who cancel class and/or who are frequently late to class--by as much as half an hour. I would not think it necessary to remind you of such matters, but clearly we have to be more mindful of our basic responsibilities. [...]"
My first reaction was "Oooh! Who is it?!". My second reaction was, "Wait, you mean I could have been coming to class 30 minutes late and just canceling it whenever I want but now the jig is up?!". But I finally realized that these other people are just stupid. If you want to be a slacker, don't come to class a half hour LATE... end class a half hour EARLY. That way, instead of inconveniencing your students, you'll be perceived as doing them a FAVOR. Nobody complains, and you still get just as much time to goof off.
Amateurs...
it's the most wonderful time...
It wouldn't be the holiday season without a little complaining about the weather, now would it?
It's fucking cold this morning.
And yet, the real story is how remarkable it is that this is the first day I've broken out the full scarf/gloves/earmuff ensemble, and it's taken until December for that to happen. But yeah, it's really winter now.
In other complaining news...
I have a splitting headache this morning. It could be that I stayed up too late. It could be that I had M&Ms for dinner last night. It could be all the tantrums associated with tree decorating. One never knows.
I have a mouthful of scrapes and sores in my delicate under-tongue region from the dentist this past weekend. I have a narrow mouth and all kinds of bone intrusions inside my lower jaw that make the dental X-ray experience something akin to the scene from "Marathon Man". Is it safe? The X-ray-chick was nice and apologetic and all while she scraped off all my mouth flesh with plastic film rectangles, but it will be weeks before the shit heals.
My thumb hurts. The left one. It hurts right on the side of the main thumb joint. It feels like it could be sprained. It has hurt for a month and it is not getting better or worse. I've considered going to the doctor, but it seems like a stupid complaint of the "Doctor, it hurts when I do THIS..." variety. But it really hurts.
Also I'm tired. Thus I will nap now.
It wouldn't be the holiday season without a little complaining about the weather, now would it?
It's fucking cold this morning.
And yet, the real story is how remarkable it is that this is the first day I've broken out the full scarf/gloves/earmuff ensemble, and it's taken until December for that to happen. But yeah, it's really winter now.
In other complaining news...
I have a splitting headache this morning. It could be that I stayed up too late. It could be that I had M&Ms for dinner last night. It could be all the tantrums associated with tree decorating. One never knows.
I have a mouthful of scrapes and sores in my delicate under-tongue region from the dentist this past weekend. I have a narrow mouth and all kinds of bone intrusions inside my lower jaw that make the dental X-ray experience something akin to the scene from "Marathon Man". Is it safe? The X-ray-chick was nice and apologetic and all while she scraped off all my mouth flesh with plastic film rectangles, but it will be weeks before the shit heals.
My thumb hurts. The left one. It hurts right on the side of the main thumb joint. It feels like it could be sprained. It has hurt for a month and it is not getting better or worse. I've considered going to the doctor, but it seems like a stupid complaint of the "Doctor, it hurts when I do THIS..." variety. But it really hurts.
Also I'm tired. Thus I will nap now.
Monday, December 4
christmas time is here...
The Dr. Dave Family went out and bought themselves a Christmas tree yesterday. It involved trips to two nurseries and two home improvement chains, with a break somewhere in between for everyone to go home and nap, but we finally came home with something. Not the best tree we've ever had, but it'll do. (7' Douglas fir, slightly squatter than I like, but very densely branchy.)
Two places where money was spent wisely in the past few years... a NEW Craftsman hand-saw that cuts through a tree trunk like a knife thru hot butter (you should have seen the pitiful thing I was hacking at trees with before I bought this thing), and a tree stand, which I believe is actually called "The Ultimate Tree Stand". It's plastic with a VERY wide base and EIGHT thumbscrews in groups of two, one above the other, with plastic tips so that they GRAB the tree instead of just drilling into it. We like big trees, and this thing is super stable.
So I got the tree in the house and mounted and vertical after the kids went to bed last night, and put what lights we have on it (not enough) so that the wife and kids can get a jump on the decorating after school today. Then there is the artificial tree to unbox and assemble and set up in the other room for the kids to decorate with paper-chains and whatnot... then there is the Xmas Village to set up, and the Lenox China Nativity Set goes in the china cabinet, and the Xmas Train needs to go someplace (maybe around the artificial tree?) and all of the knick-knacks and tchotchkes need to come out of their bins (Oh! The bins! SO MANY BINS!) and find places on the shelves and the walls, and the wife and I need to have our annual Argument About The Outside Lights because once again, we have put it off until it is freezing cold, and we still don't own an extension ladder...
Do we see why Dr. Dave gets grumpy about the holidays? I should take a picture of our stack of Xmas bins. I bet Macy's uses less storage space for decorations.
Anyway.
We are down to the last 2 weeks of classes, basically. The 18th, 19th, 20th, and 21st are still school days, but I dunno... I think I want to finish a little earlier than that. I may have my exams on the 19th, mostly. But for now I'm still working on how to wrap things up over the next 4 class periods. I'm seriously considering walking into my "What is Science?" class today and saying - "Ok, kids... it's been a great semester and I've had a lot of fun and all, but I am fucking DONE... what do you want to do for the next four days?"
In Astro, I'm going to be ok, and in Physics I think I'll be able to stretch things out thanks to a time-consuming in-class activity I've been working on all weekend. (It has to do with simulating Maxwell Boltzmann statistics by assigning discrete energies to an ensemble of four molecules and I'm still not sure it makes sense technically, but it WORKS, and it gets the idea across without calculus... just by counting numbers in squares, so... I think I'm going ahead with it.) But I'm babbling, when really I should be GRADING, so... I'm off for now.
The Dr. Dave Family went out and bought themselves a Christmas tree yesterday. It involved trips to two nurseries and two home improvement chains, with a break somewhere in between for everyone to go home and nap, but we finally came home with something. Not the best tree we've ever had, but it'll do. (7' Douglas fir, slightly squatter than I like, but very densely branchy.)
Two places where money was spent wisely in the past few years... a NEW Craftsman hand-saw that cuts through a tree trunk like a knife thru hot butter (you should have seen the pitiful thing I was hacking at trees with before I bought this thing), and a tree stand, which I believe is actually called "The Ultimate Tree Stand". It's plastic with a VERY wide base and EIGHT thumbscrews in groups of two, one above the other, with plastic tips so that they GRAB the tree instead of just drilling into it. We like big trees, and this thing is super stable.
So I got the tree in the house and mounted and vertical after the kids went to bed last night, and put what lights we have on it (not enough) so that the wife and kids can get a jump on the decorating after school today. Then there is the artificial tree to unbox and assemble and set up in the other room for the kids to decorate with paper-chains and whatnot... then there is the Xmas Village to set up, and the Lenox China Nativity Set goes in the china cabinet, and the Xmas Train needs to go someplace (maybe around the artificial tree?) and all of the knick-knacks and tchotchkes need to come out of their bins (Oh! The bins! SO MANY BINS!) and find places on the shelves and the walls, and the wife and I need to have our annual Argument About The Outside Lights because once again, we have put it off until it is freezing cold, and we still don't own an extension ladder...
Do we see why Dr. Dave gets grumpy about the holidays? I should take a picture of our stack of Xmas bins. I bet Macy's uses less storage space for decorations.
Anyway.
We are down to the last 2 weeks of classes, basically. The 18th, 19th, 20th, and 21st are still school days, but I dunno... I think I want to finish a little earlier than that. I may have my exams on the 19th, mostly. But for now I'm still working on how to wrap things up over the next 4 class periods. I'm seriously considering walking into my "What is Science?" class today and saying - "Ok, kids... it's been a great semester and I've had a lot of fun and all, but I am fucking DONE... what do you want to do for the next four days?"
In Astro, I'm going to be ok, and in Physics I think I'll be able to stretch things out thanks to a time-consuming in-class activity I've been working on all weekend. (It has to do with simulating Maxwell Boltzmann statistics by assigning discrete energies to an ensemble of four molecules and I'm still not sure it makes sense technically, but it WORKS, and it gets the idea across without calculus... just by counting numbers in squares, so... I think I'm going ahead with it.) But I'm babbling, when really I should be GRADING, so... I'm off for now.
Saturday, December 2
Wednesday, November 29
ugh...
I gave the students in my "What is Science?" class a very simple experiment (the period of a simple pendulum) to do on Monday, just to have some data to talk about and just to have a sort of meta-discussion about experiment design and whatnot.
Complete. Fucking. Disaster.
Most of these students are juniors and seniors majoring in science. It's appalling that these students don't seem to be able to think about HOW to do an experiment... how to make careful measurements, how to control things that need to be controlled, and what to DO with the data once they have it. I got a data table from one group that I can't even make ANY sense of. Their numbers for the period of the pendulum range from 40 to 100 seconds. THE PERIOD OF YOUR PENDULUM WAS NOT 100 SECONDS!! It wasn't even 10. No matter WHERE you put the decimal, those numbers don't make sense.
I don't even know what to DO today to follow up on the experience. I'm considering making them do the whole thing over again... and actually THINKING this time.
I gave the students in my "What is Science?" class a very simple experiment (the period of a simple pendulum) to do on Monday, just to have some data to talk about and just to have a sort of meta-discussion about experiment design and whatnot.
Complete. Fucking. Disaster.
Most of these students are juniors and seniors majoring in science. It's appalling that these students don't seem to be able to think about HOW to do an experiment... how to make careful measurements, how to control things that need to be controlled, and what to DO with the data once they have it. I got a data table from one group that I can't even make ANY sense of. Their numbers for the period of the pendulum range from 40 to 100 seconds. THE PERIOD OF YOUR PENDULUM WAS NOT 100 SECONDS!! It wasn't even 10. No matter WHERE you put the decimal, those numbers don't make sense.
I don't even know what to DO today to follow up on the experience. I'm considering making them do the whole thing over again... and actually THINKING this time.
energy crisis...
Time to put in a call to the crack team at "Facilities". The electrical outlet in the front of my classroom is on the fritz, and so sometimes when you plug something into it, it requires a little jiggle to get it to make good contact. Well, apparently I forgot to jiggle it today, because apparently the whole time I was giving a presentation in my Astro class the afternoon, my laptop battery just sat and drained away. It's at 36% right now, which is barely enough to get me to the first fucking train stop.
Fuck.
Oh well. Dead computer...? Sounds like a pretty good reason to take a nap.
Time to put in a call to the crack team at "Facilities". The electrical outlet in the front of my classroom is on the fritz, and so sometimes when you plug something into it, it requires a little jiggle to get it to make good contact. Well, apparently I forgot to jiggle it today, because apparently the whole time I was giving a presentation in my Astro class the afternoon, my laptop battery just sat and drained away. It's at 36% right now, which is barely enough to get me to the first fucking train stop.
Fuck.
Oh well. Dead computer...? Sounds like a pretty good reason to take a nap.
Tuesday, November 28
celebrity sightings of the week...
Today: John Stewart talking on cellphone walking down 6th
Last Tuesday: John Leguizamo nearly ran me down in the Union Square Barnes and Noble
At Least Weekly: The actress who played Paul Buchman's mother, Sylvia, on "Mad About You" lives a couple doors down from my office.
Hey... I didn't say they were all MAJOR celebrities.
Today: John Stewart talking on cellphone walking down 6th
Last Tuesday: John Leguizamo nearly ran me down in the Union Square Barnes and Noble
At Least Weekly: The actress who played Paul Buchman's mother, Sylvia, on "Mad About You" lives a couple doors down from my office.
Hey... I didn't say they were all MAJOR celebrities.
the book of limbo...
I guess it's time for an update on the Book Project That Wouldn't Die. Last week I unexpectedly got a check from the original editors for half the contract amount. It's a pittance, money-wise... but given that I have pretty much stopped pursuing them and given up on seeing any payment at all from that original agreement, it was infinity-times more than I was expecting.
And so this week I got an offer of sorts from the NEW editorial firm to continue working on Version 2.0 of the project. The pay is considerably less, the commitment is somewhat vague, and the material I wrote originally will have to be essentially completely rewritten. (The email from the editor is full of vaguely backhanded compliments of the sort - "Clearly you are a great lecturer and a talented writer, but the tone of what you've written here is completely inappropriate for this particular work". I'm paraphrasing, but that's the gist of it.) But I devoted too much of my energy last year to this project to see it shrivel up and die, so... I'm on board, I guess. Some clarifications are still needed, but hopefully I'll be able to spend January writing.
All's I know is... there had better be a damned hardcover book with my name in it at the end of this fucking process.
I guess it's time for an update on the Book Project That Wouldn't Die. Last week I unexpectedly got a check from the original editors for half the contract amount. It's a pittance, money-wise... but given that I have pretty much stopped pursuing them and given up on seeing any payment at all from that original agreement, it was infinity-times more than I was expecting.
And so this week I got an offer of sorts from the NEW editorial firm to continue working on Version 2.0 of the project. The pay is considerably less, the commitment is somewhat vague, and the material I wrote originally will have to be essentially completely rewritten. (The email from the editor is full of vaguely backhanded compliments of the sort - "Clearly you are a great lecturer and a talented writer, but the tone of what you've written here is completely inappropriate for this particular work". I'm paraphrasing, but that's the gist of it.) But I devoted too much of my energy last year to this project to see it shrivel up and die, so... I'm on board, I guess. Some clarifications are still needed, but hopefully I'll be able to spend January writing.
All's I know is... there had better be a damned hardcover book with my name in it at the end of this fucking process.
Monday, November 27
what to do...?
In most jobs, if you find yourself ahead of schedule, it's probably because you've been working extra hard. But in academia, when you find yourself ahead of your syllabus, sometimes that means you've been being lazy. Leaving out some material here, cutting corners on that topic there... at least that's the case with me. (Surprising, I know...) And as the semester winds down, I'm finding myself looking at a couple of my courses, thinking... what the hell am I going to DO for the last two weeks??
The astronomy class is not a problem. Well... not a big one anyway. If I wind up running out of pure astronomy topics, I can spend a day talking about particle physics and its relation to the big bang, and a day on string theory. Plus I've been meaning to expand the section on extraterrestrial life, and that could involve a whole lecture on natural selection and evolution. It may get scatterbrained, but there will be stuff to talk about.
The philosophy of science class is scatterbrained ALREADY. The topics have taken a turn into things that I'm even less prepared to talk about than I thought. It demands activities and worksheets and such that I just haven't put together yet. Today I'll have them working on a lab activity just to occupy a class while I think about what to do next.
But the worst is the physics class. Ugh. The topic list still fills the last few weeks of class, but when I look at the topics for each day, it seems like each one is something I could cover in 15 minutes. Absolute zero, Maxwell's Demon, entropy and the arrow of time... all interesting things, but none of them quite add up to a whole class.
Hopefully I'll be rescued by administrative minutae in this case. I have a follow-up to a pre-and-post-type assessment tool that I gave at the start of the semester. That should take half a class. I have the course evaluations, which could be stretched out to half a class if I add my own supplement. I'm searching for a movie that might eat up another half. And I'm definitely bailing on the last day of class, which is scheduled for Dec 21, even though the cancellation of that week's Tuesday class means the final will have to be on the 14th, which is a whole week early. If that gets around, I could conceivably get into some trouble, but I think I can judge pretty well when a course is just DONE. And this class is definitely done. Not that it was a bad class... I think it went pretty well. The class dynamic is the best of my 3, and almost half the students are clamoring to get into my courses next semester. But I don't think their little brains are going to absorb much more physics between now and Xmas, and I don't have that much left to give them anyway. So, let's call it a semester.
Meanwhile, the amount of grading I have to do is fucking CRAZY, and if I were smart, I'd get right on some of that RIGHT NOW. I have the in-class writing assignment on the Lord Byron poem in my bag. Maybe I'll give those a quick pass on the train.
In most jobs, if you find yourself ahead of schedule, it's probably because you've been working extra hard. But in academia, when you find yourself ahead of your syllabus, sometimes that means you've been being lazy. Leaving out some material here, cutting corners on that topic there... at least that's the case with me. (Surprising, I know...) And as the semester winds down, I'm finding myself looking at a couple of my courses, thinking... what the hell am I going to DO for the last two weeks??
The astronomy class is not a problem. Well... not a big one anyway. If I wind up running out of pure astronomy topics, I can spend a day talking about particle physics and its relation to the big bang, and a day on string theory. Plus I've been meaning to expand the section on extraterrestrial life, and that could involve a whole lecture on natural selection and evolution. It may get scatterbrained, but there will be stuff to talk about.
The philosophy of science class is scatterbrained ALREADY. The topics have taken a turn into things that I'm even less prepared to talk about than I thought. It demands activities and worksheets and such that I just haven't put together yet. Today I'll have them working on a lab activity just to occupy a class while I think about what to do next.
But the worst is the physics class. Ugh. The topic list still fills the last few weeks of class, but when I look at the topics for each day, it seems like each one is something I could cover in 15 minutes. Absolute zero, Maxwell's Demon, entropy and the arrow of time... all interesting things, but none of them quite add up to a whole class.
Hopefully I'll be rescued by administrative minutae in this case. I have a follow-up to a pre-and-post-type assessment tool that I gave at the start of the semester. That should take half a class. I have the course evaluations, which could be stretched out to half a class if I add my own supplement. I'm searching for a movie that might eat up another half. And I'm definitely bailing on the last day of class, which is scheduled for Dec 21, even though the cancellation of that week's Tuesday class means the final will have to be on the 14th, which is a whole week early. If that gets around, I could conceivably get into some trouble, but I think I can judge pretty well when a course is just DONE. And this class is definitely done. Not that it was a bad class... I think it went pretty well. The class dynamic is the best of my 3, and almost half the students are clamoring to get into my courses next semester. But I don't think their little brains are going to absorb much more physics between now and Xmas, and I don't have that much left to give them anyway. So, let's call it a semester.
Meanwhile, the amount of grading I have to do is fucking CRAZY, and if I were smart, I'd get right on some of that RIGHT NOW. I have the in-class writing assignment on the Lord Byron poem in my bag. Maybe I'll give those a quick pass on the train.
grading...
Wow. Grading 15 of these in-class writing assignments only took me 25 minutes. The moral of THAT story...? Give more in-class writing assignments!! And I have to say... the "blue books"? LOVE THEM!! Grading them makes me feel like a real college professor. Of course the irony of writing about a poem in which mankind burns down every living tree for sustenance in a bluebook where only 3 or 4 of the 10 pages are used and the rest are wasted is not lost on me.
Now it's time to gear up for some of the more daunting grading... midterm papers! Shudder...
Wow. Grading 15 of these in-class writing assignments only took me 25 minutes. The moral of THAT story...? Give more in-class writing assignments!! And I have to say... the "blue books"? LOVE THEM!! Grading them makes me feel like a real college professor. Of course the irony of writing about a poem in which mankind burns down every living tree for sustenance in a bluebook where only 3 or 4 of the 10 pages are used and the rest are wasted is not lost on me.
Now it's time to gear up for some of the more daunting grading... midterm papers! Shudder...
Sunday, November 26
holiday weekend in brief...
not up for serious blogging. a bullet-point recap...
* Mom, roommate, brother and brother's wife arrived Thursday morning. Much food was eaten.
* Dave and Wife leave for Black Friday shopping at 6:00 AM. Toys'R'Us is sold out of Robosapiens, Kohl's is a crowded nightmare but we stand in line anyway, Target demands the usual $200 per-visit contribution.
* I still have ZERO ideas for the wife for Xmas
* Friday night, dinner at Outback... Mom's treat.
* Saturday we hang out and do very little. My brother and I watch stupid YouTube videos and jam on acoustic guitars and bongos in the basement. Mom plays computer games with the kids.
* Wife spends much time stuck talking to brother's wife. Her opinion that this is the most boring person she has ever met is only reinforced.
* Family leaves Saturday around noon. Recovery begins. We take the kids to see "Flushed Away". Wife enjoys the humor a little *too* much.
* Sunday - Wife works in the basement while I play my new "Dragon Quest VIII" game with the kids huddled around.
* Dave unwinds with the new bottle of Tanqueray and posts a sketchy blog entry.
* That is all.
not up for serious blogging. a bullet-point recap...
* Mom, roommate, brother and brother's wife arrived Thursday morning. Much food was eaten.
* Dave and Wife leave for Black Friday shopping at 6:00 AM. Toys'R'Us is sold out of Robosapiens, Kohl's is a crowded nightmare but we stand in line anyway, Target demands the usual $200 per-visit contribution.
* I still have ZERO ideas for the wife for Xmas
* Friday night, dinner at Outback... Mom's treat.
* Saturday we hang out and do very little. My brother and I watch stupid YouTube videos and jam on acoustic guitars and bongos in the basement. Mom plays computer games with the kids.
* Wife spends much time stuck talking to brother's wife. Her opinion that this is the most boring person she has ever met is only reinforced.
* Family leaves Saturday around noon. Recovery begins. We take the kids to see "Flushed Away". Wife enjoys the humor a little *too* much.
* Sunday - Wife works in the basement while I play my new "Dragon Quest VIII" game with the kids huddled around.
* Dave unwinds with the new bottle of Tanqueray and posts a sketchy blog entry.
* That is all.
Monday, November 20
too old to "rock"...
Saturday night I went next door to jam with my neighbor the drummer and his friends. Short version... played until midnight, drank 2 somewhat large JD & Pepsi's, stayed up until nearly 3:00 AM.
Ugh. Sunday required no fewer than three naps to recover.
Long version...
My neighbor's wife invited my wife out for dinner and a movie with her friends. This caused my neighbor to pout and then organize his OWN guy-night-thing in response. So he invited ME over to jam with him and some other friends of his. (Thus we had to hire a babysitter.) So I head over there at 5:30 with my gear and we get all set up and run through about 6 minutes of 12-bar blues to get loosened up, and then we stop and my neighbor goes - "OK, let's go get something to eat."
I assumed this would involve calling for pizza, but no... it involved piling into 2 cars and driving to a restaurant 20 minutes away. What the fuck? I'M PAYING A BABYSITTER!! I could have stayed home until you guys came back and saved $20. (plus the money I spent on dinner!) I just wanted to play, I didn't want a whole social-occasion thing with people I barely know... especially since going out to dinner with these guys was like going to a restaurant with the cast of the fucking Blue Collar Comedy Tour. And I hate to be all "classist" and shit, but really, when the conversation turned away from Gibson vs. Fender, I really had very little in common with these guys.
And so we leave my neighbor's house and not 5 minutes out the door, my neighbor realizes he brought the wrong set of keys, so we are all locked out of his house. Which involves driving ANOTHER 20 minutes past the restaurant to meet up with his wife (and all the wives) who have elected to go to dinner and a movie at an absolutely insane distance away from home. Why? WHY?
The upshot of this was that we actually got down to playing not at 5:30 as I originally hoped, but at 9:15. I was pretty irritated. Then when we started playing, I broke the g-string on my Strat after about 5 minutes. Fuck.
But once I switched guitars and things got rolling, it went well and I had fun. They were all a little too impressed by my playing, which is flattering, but at the same time... not the perfect situation. It's actually much more fun to play with people who are BETTER than you. The other guitar guy had a fairly fancy recording setup running, so I'm sure I'll post some snippets on the "Weekly Improv" when he burns me a disc.
We wrapped up around midnight, a little after the wives got home and headed over to my house to hang out where it was quiet. (well.. quietER) We hung out talking until about 1:30, when I walked over with my first load of gear and chatted with the wife for a few minutes. She went to bed and I went back next door. We hung out and I had another drink and the guys smoked some cigars, and I finally came home around 2:45.
Ugh.
Then to cap it all off, on Sunday afternoon, after my wife and I had traded off naps all morning, I asked her if we were going to run any errands or anything that evening and she starts in with "Well, I had plans to do this and this and this but since you've spent all morning napping I guess we can't do that... I'm kind of pissed of that you stayed out until 3:00"
Umm... WHAT? Ok... first of all, we've BOTH been napping all morning, and second of all, THIS WAS NOT MY "THING". This was YOUR thing... I only went along with the other thing to be neighborly and polite. It's not like I WANTED to go out to dinner at TGIFridays with the cast of American Chopper. And THIRDLY, if you had TOLD me about these plans BEFOREHAND, maybe something could have been done about it.
Ahem.
I think I'm still a little tired.
Saturday night I went next door to jam with my neighbor the drummer and his friends. Short version... played until midnight, drank 2 somewhat large JD & Pepsi's, stayed up until nearly 3:00 AM.
Ugh. Sunday required no fewer than three naps to recover.
Long version...
My neighbor's wife invited my wife out for dinner and a movie with her friends. This caused my neighbor to pout and then organize his OWN guy-night-thing in response. So he invited ME over to jam with him and some other friends of his. (Thus we had to hire a babysitter.) So I head over there at 5:30 with my gear and we get all set up and run through about 6 minutes of 12-bar blues to get loosened up, and then we stop and my neighbor goes - "OK, let's go get something to eat."
I assumed this would involve calling for pizza, but no... it involved piling into 2 cars and driving to a restaurant 20 minutes away. What the fuck? I'M PAYING A BABYSITTER!! I could have stayed home until you guys came back and saved $20. (plus the money I spent on dinner!) I just wanted to play, I didn't want a whole social-occasion thing with people I barely know... especially since going out to dinner with these guys was like going to a restaurant with the cast of the fucking Blue Collar Comedy Tour. And I hate to be all "classist" and shit, but really, when the conversation turned away from Gibson vs. Fender, I really had very little in common with these guys.
And so we leave my neighbor's house and not 5 minutes out the door, my neighbor realizes he brought the wrong set of keys, so we are all locked out of his house. Which involves driving ANOTHER 20 minutes past the restaurant to meet up with his wife (and all the wives) who have elected to go to dinner and a movie at an absolutely insane distance away from home. Why? WHY?
The upshot of this was that we actually got down to playing not at 5:30 as I originally hoped, but at 9:15. I was pretty irritated. Then when we started playing, I broke the g-string on my Strat after about 5 minutes. Fuck.
But once I switched guitars and things got rolling, it went well and I had fun. They were all a little too impressed by my playing, which is flattering, but at the same time... not the perfect situation. It's actually much more fun to play with people who are BETTER than you. The other guitar guy had a fairly fancy recording setup running, so I'm sure I'll post some snippets on the "Weekly Improv" when he burns me a disc.
We wrapped up around midnight, a little after the wives got home and headed over to my house to hang out where it was quiet. (well.. quietER) We hung out talking until about 1:30, when I walked over with my first load of gear and chatted with the wife for a few minutes. She went to bed and I went back next door. We hung out and I had another drink and the guys smoked some cigars, and I finally came home around 2:45.
Ugh.
Then to cap it all off, on Sunday afternoon, after my wife and I had traded off naps all morning, I asked her if we were going to run any errands or anything that evening and she starts in with "Well, I had plans to do this and this and this but since you've spent all morning napping I guess we can't do that... I'm kind of pissed of that you stayed out until 3:00"
Umm... WHAT? Ok... first of all, we've BOTH been napping all morning, and second of all, THIS WAS NOT MY "THING". This was YOUR thing... I only went along with the other thing to be neighborly and polite. It's not like I WANTED to go out to dinner at TGIFridays with the cast of American Chopper. And THIRDLY, if you had TOLD me about these plans BEFOREHAND, maybe something could have been done about it.
Ahem.
I think I'm still a little tired.
Sunday, November 19
failed by technology... saved by technology...
The other night our cable was OFF for some reason when "Survivor" was on, so our TiVo recorded an hour of black screen. So we went to the Apple iTunes store and spent $1.99 to download the episode, and tonight we'll hook my iPod up to the TV to watch it.
See how technology makes our life SIMPLE!!
The other night our cable was OFF for some reason when "Survivor" was on, so our TiVo recorded an hour of black screen. So we went to the Apple iTunes store and spent $1.99 to download the episode, and tonight we'll hook my iPod up to the TV to watch it.
See how technology makes our life SIMPLE!!
from the Chronicle of Higher Ed...
In an article about some kind of national "Professor of the Year" awards...
Oh really? Well I can draw my students in without gimmicks, and hold their interest WITHOUT bribing them with candy. Where's MY fucking award? This kind of sideshow approach to classroom teaching really bugs me, and giving an award to honor goofy gee-whizzery only encourages more teachers to devote time to explosions and puppet shows rather than really thinking about how to communicate more effectively.
Ok. My peeve is petted. Carry on...
In an article about some kind of national "Professor of the Year" awards...
Alexei V. Filippenko, a professor of astronomy at the University of California at Berkeley, won in the category of doctoral and research universities. The "Introduction to General Astronomy" course that he has taught one semester per year for the past two decades has become one of Berkeley's most popular classes.
"Especially in a large class for students who are not majors, you have to have some way of engaging them. I do demonstrations. One of my favorites is that I jump from one chair to the floor to a desk and toss balls of different colors out to students, and the students toss them back to me. That illustrates how electrons in an atom can go from one discrete energy level to another. If the wrong color ball gets thrown to me, I stay put because it wasn't the right kind of excitation.
"One year I jumped from the desk to a chair and the chair collapsed. A rather sharp spike zapped me in a rib and cracked it. It hurt like hell for a month.
"I tie a doughnut to a string and twirl it around my head to illustrate how gravity works. Eventually the string eats its way through and the doughnut goes flying off -- not radially as many people's intuition tells them it will, but tangentially. I play music before class starts, typically pop music -- "Champagne Supernova," "Black Hole Sun," Monty Python's "Galaxy Song" -- corresponding to the theme of that day's class. On Halloween I dress up as a black hole -- with a black robe, hood, and gloves, and dark glasses -- and at one point I start throwing astronomically themed candy at students, like Milky Way bars, Mars bars, and Starburst candy, to illustrate the quantum mechanical Hawking process by which black holes are thought to evaporate.
"It's just a gimmick to draw students in."
Oh really? Well I can draw my students in without gimmicks, and hold their interest WITHOUT bribing them with candy. Where's MY fucking award? This kind of sideshow approach to classroom teaching really bugs me, and giving an award to honor goofy gee-whizzery only encourages more teachers to devote time to explosions and puppet shows rather than really thinking about how to communicate more effectively.
Ok. My peeve is petted. Carry on...
Friday, November 17
in lieu of content...
... I instead present, what I spend the last train ride working on... a list of my course descriptions for 2007/2008
THE FOUNDATIONS OF PHYSICS
This course is intended as an introduction to the basic concepts of physics - motion, forces, and energy. During the first half of the semester we will study the birth of physics as a truly scientific endeavor, through the works of Galileo Galilei and Sir Isaac Newton. Then in the second half of the semester, we will study heat and the motions of molecules. We will also explore the ideas of entropy and the Second Law of Thermodynamics, one of the most far-reaching and profound yet puzzling laws in all of physics. The course will combine a problem-solving approach to physics with a historical one, and texts will include primary source works such as Galileo's "Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences", Newton's "Principia Mathematica", and others.
SPACE, TIME, AND EINSTEIN
Albert Einstein is perhaps the most recognizable figure in the history of science, and yet his Theory of Relativity remains a mystery to most people even today, more than 100 years after its publication. In this class we will examine the both the origin of Einstein's theory and its role in shaping the past century of modern physics. Topics will include the universality of the speed of light, the mathematics of the Lorentz transformations, the curvature of space-time, the physics of black holes, and the possibility of time travel. We will also discuss the life of Albert Einstein and his status as a cultural icon and the embodiment of our image of scientific "genius". (NOTE: This is a 3000 level course that requires at least one prior course in physics or mathematics.)
THE QUANTUM UNIVERSE
This course will investigate the bizarre world of quantum mechanics, the science of the very small, where the certainty and predictability of the world-at-large dissolves into uncertainty, randomness, and probabilities. The course will explore the early history of quantum ideas (from the likes of Planck, Bohr, Einstein, and Heisenberg) as well as the modern so-called "Standard Model" of fundamental particles and their interactions. We will also examine the ideas of string theory, multiple dimensions, and the ongoing quest for an ultimate "Theory of Everything." (NOTE: Not open to students who have taken the "Contemporary Physics" course in Spring 2007)
INTRODUCTION TO ASTRONOMY
In this online course, we will explore both the foundations and the cutting edge of modern astronomy. Topics will include planetary science, stellar evolution, Big Bang cosmology, and the recent discoveries of the existence of both "dark matter" and "dark energy". We will also devote considerable time to discussing the possibility of life elsewhere in the universe. The course format will combine lecture podcasts, streaming video documentaries, software simulations, and online discussion forums.
THE SCIENCE OF MUSIC AND SOUND
If a tree falls in an empty forest, does it make a sound? Your answer to this age-old question depends on your definition of the word "sound". Is sound something that happens in the air? Something that happens in your ear? Or something that happens in your mind? This course will explore all these aspects of auditory phenomena - the physical vibrations and waves that underlie the performance of musical instruments, the biology of the ear and hearing, the cognitive aspects of music perception, and the psychological and emotional impact of music . Other topics may include electronic music synthesis, concert hall acoustics, and the origin and evolutionary roots of musical expression. (This course will be co-taught by instructors from the science faculty and the music faculty.)
(PS - I just found out I have to change the last one, because there is a rule that we're not allowed to have questions in our course descriptions. How delightfully arbitrary!)
... I instead present, what I spend the last train ride working on... a list of my course descriptions for 2007/2008
THE FOUNDATIONS OF PHYSICS
This course is intended as an introduction to the basic concepts of physics - motion, forces, and energy. During the first half of the semester we will study the birth of physics as a truly scientific endeavor, through the works of Galileo Galilei and Sir Isaac Newton. Then in the second half of the semester, we will study heat and the motions of molecules. We will also explore the ideas of entropy and the Second Law of Thermodynamics, one of the most far-reaching and profound yet puzzling laws in all of physics. The course will combine a problem-solving approach to physics with a historical one, and texts will include primary source works such as Galileo's "Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences", Newton's "Principia Mathematica", and others.
SPACE, TIME, AND EINSTEIN
Albert Einstein is perhaps the most recognizable figure in the history of science, and yet his Theory of Relativity remains a mystery to most people even today, more than 100 years after its publication. In this class we will examine the both the origin of Einstein's theory and its role in shaping the past century of modern physics. Topics will include the universality of the speed of light, the mathematics of the Lorentz transformations, the curvature of space-time, the physics of black holes, and the possibility of time travel. We will also discuss the life of Albert Einstein and his status as a cultural icon and the embodiment of our image of scientific "genius". (NOTE: This is a 3000 level course that requires at least one prior course in physics or mathematics.)
THE QUANTUM UNIVERSE
This course will investigate the bizarre world of quantum mechanics, the science of the very small, where the certainty and predictability of the world-at-large dissolves into uncertainty, randomness, and probabilities. The course will explore the early history of quantum ideas (from the likes of Planck, Bohr, Einstein, and Heisenberg) as well as the modern so-called "Standard Model" of fundamental particles and their interactions. We will also examine the ideas of string theory, multiple dimensions, and the ongoing quest for an ultimate "Theory of Everything." (NOTE: Not open to students who have taken the "Contemporary Physics" course in Spring 2007)
INTRODUCTION TO ASTRONOMY
In this online course, we will explore both the foundations and the cutting edge of modern astronomy. Topics will include planetary science, stellar evolution, Big Bang cosmology, and the recent discoveries of the existence of both "dark matter" and "dark energy". We will also devote considerable time to discussing the possibility of life elsewhere in the universe. The course format will combine lecture podcasts, streaming video documentaries, software simulations, and online discussion forums.
THE SCIENCE OF MUSIC AND SOUND
If a tree falls in an empty forest, does it make a sound? Your answer to this age-old question depends on your definition of the word "sound". Is sound something that happens in the air? Something that happens in your ear? Or something that happens in your mind? This course will explore all these aspects of auditory phenomena - the physical vibrations and waves that underlie the performance of musical instruments, the biology of the ear and hearing, the cognitive aspects of music perception, and the psychological and emotional impact of music . Other topics may include electronic music synthesis, concert hall acoustics, and the origin and evolutionary roots of musical expression. (This course will be co-taught by instructors from the science faculty and the music faculty.)
(PS - I just found out I have to change the last one, because there is a rule that we're not allowed to have questions in our course descriptions. How delightfully arbitrary!)
Thursday, November 16
Wednesday, November 15
future plans and ass-kissing...
So today within the span of 15 minutes I agreed to transform my Astronomy course from a standard classroom offering into a new online extravaganza and multimedia circus (Fall 07) and to develop and team-teach a brand new "Science and Religion" course with the chair of the Religious Studies department (Spring 08, tentative).
Could this be related to yesterday's post about worrying for my contract review? Is Dave just trying to suck up to the administration's every whim?
Pretty much, yeah.
I have always wanted to teach a course on Science and Religion, though. And the guy I'd be co-teaching with is a great guy. Smart guy. Popular teacher. I think that with the two of us in on this class, it could quite possibly be the most ass-kickingist class in the entire University curriculum.
As for delivering Astronomy as an online course, it's kind of a no-brainer. I have a digital audio recording of nearly every lecture I've given this semester. I'll take the 15 best ones, have the students listen to one a week, assign some books for them to journal and summarize, make them watch Carl Sagan's "Cosmos" on Google Video (Shh! Don't tell the copyright lawyers!!) host a few discussion forums about interesting topics, give them some assignments where they have to use the Starry Night software... it'll be no work at all for me to put together. And I get super tech-genius-innovator brownie points!
So today within the span of 15 minutes I agreed to transform my Astronomy course from a standard classroom offering into a new online extravaganza and multimedia circus (Fall 07) and to develop and team-teach a brand new "Science and Religion" course with the chair of the Religious Studies department (Spring 08, tentative).
Could this be related to yesterday's post about worrying for my contract review? Is Dave just trying to suck up to the administration's every whim?
Pretty much, yeah.
I have always wanted to teach a course on Science and Religion, though. And the guy I'd be co-teaching with is a great guy. Smart guy. Popular teacher. I think that with the two of us in on this class, it could quite possibly be the most ass-kickingist class in the entire University curriculum.
As for delivering Astronomy as an online course, it's kind of a no-brainer. I have a digital audio recording of nearly every lecture I've given this semester. I'll take the 15 best ones, have the students listen to one a week, assign some books for them to journal and summarize, make them watch Carl Sagan's "Cosmos" on Google Video (Shh! Don't tell the copyright lawyers!!) host a few discussion forums about interesting topics, give them some assignments where they have to use the Starry Night software... it'll be no work at all for me to put together. And I get super tech-genius-innovator brownie points!
Tuesday, November 14
meetings...
Met with various advisees today. Signed forms, handed out PINS. Fun fun. I was supposed to have a committee meeting tonight also, but that was cancelled for some reason. Which means I get to go home and watch the kids while the wife goes to the PTO meeting at school, then out to get drunk with the PTO Moms. (Only slightly joking.) HAd my meeting not been cancelled, we would have had to get a babysitter. We had an IM snippy-fight about this issue with meetings the other day. She said something like "Well, you know, if taking care of household things is my "job" then going to PTO meetings is part of that job. We need to talk about who's meetings get precedence." To which I replied, "Well. Ok... let's see... Who's meetings could a failure to attend result in them getting fired?" Case closed.
Speaking of getting fired, at some point I should blog about my contract. It's complicated and gives me a headache, though. Perhaps a timeline would help.
2001: Dave gets hired on a 1-year visiting contract with option for renewal.
2002: Dave's contract gets converted to a 3 year renewable contract.
2004: Dave quits before his 3 year contract is up. ("the Lost Year")
2005: Dave gets re-hired. The terms of the hire indicate that this will be considered Dave's SECOND 3-year contract, as if "The Lost Year" had never occurred. This would mean the option of a 5-year renewal in 2008, with sabbatical eligibility.
2006: The administration changes the contract structure. There is now an option for tenure. Whether you choose to go for tenure or not, the 5-year appointment review is now "up-or-out". Meaning if you do not pass the review, you are basically fired. (There is a 1-year "dead-man-walking" grade period.)
So. I get a contract renewal letter that sets the date for my review, which I didn't realize at the time was up-or-out. When I learn that the 5-year review IS in fact up-or-out, I read my letter more carefully only to find that they letter does NOT mention the agreement of considering my first 3 year review, and is treating the 2008 review as for another 3-year appointment, not a 5-year.
Are you still with me?
I contact the Assistant Provost, and she tells me I have a decision to make. I can either go for a 3-year renewal or a 5-year renewal, but they have decided that it's probably a really bad idea for people to go up for a 5-year up-or-out review if they have never been reviewed before. (I was never reviewed... only RE-HIRED!) Combine this with the fact that the whole idea of what is-or-is-not an acceptable level scholarship is being rethought, and you have one big mess that needs to be sorted out. It feels a bit like my career hinges on a big roulette spin.
Ok. I don't want to think about it anymore.
Met with various advisees today. Signed forms, handed out PINS. Fun fun. I was supposed to have a committee meeting tonight also, but that was cancelled for some reason. Which means I get to go home and watch the kids while the wife goes to the PTO meeting at school, then out to get drunk with the PTO Moms. (Only slightly joking.) HAd my meeting not been cancelled, we would have had to get a babysitter. We had an IM snippy-fight about this issue with meetings the other day. She said something like "Well, you know, if taking care of household things is my "job" then going to PTO meetings is part of that job. We need to talk about who's meetings get precedence." To which I replied, "Well. Ok... let's see... Who's meetings could a failure to attend result in them getting fired?" Case closed.
Speaking of getting fired, at some point I should blog about my contract. It's complicated and gives me a headache, though. Perhaps a timeline would help.
2001: Dave gets hired on a 1-year visiting contract with option for renewal.
2002: Dave's contract gets converted to a 3 year renewable contract.
2004: Dave quits before his 3 year contract is up. ("the Lost Year")
2005: Dave gets re-hired. The terms of the hire indicate that this will be considered Dave's SECOND 3-year contract, as if "The Lost Year" had never occurred. This would mean the option of a 5-year renewal in 2008, with sabbatical eligibility.
2006: The administration changes the contract structure. There is now an option for tenure. Whether you choose to go for tenure or not, the 5-year appointment review is now "up-or-out". Meaning if you do not pass the review, you are basically fired. (There is a 1-year "dead-man-walking" grade period.)
So. I get a contract renewal letter that sets the date for my review, which I didn't realize at the time was up-or-out. When I learn that the 5-year review IS in fact up-or-out, I read my letter more carefully only to find that they letter does NOT mention the agreement of considering my first 3 year review, and is treating the 2008 review as for another 3-year appointment, not a 5-year.
Are you still with me?
I contact the Assistant Provost, and she tells me I have a decision to make. I can either go for a 3-year renewal or a 5-year renewal, but they have decided that it's probably a really bad idea for people to go up for a 5-year up-or-out review if they have never been reviewed before. (I was never reviewed... only RE-HIRED!) Combine this with the fact that the whole idea of what is-or-is-not an acceptable level scholarship is being rethought, and you have one big mess that needs to be sorted out. It feels a bit like my career hinges on a big roulette spin.
Ok. I don't want to think about it anymore.
Monday, November 13
i thought new orleans was a "chocolate city"...
The other thing we did on Friday besides the Festive Showgirl Kickaplaooza was to attend the New York Chocolate Show. If you think there is no limit to the amount of free gourmet dark chocolate you could eat, think again. The samples are so tiny! There are so many flavors! Why thank you, don't mind if I do! After about the 30th booth you feel like you have a fucking 85% cacao BRICK in your stomach.
We won't even get into what it did to the children.
The other thing we did on Friday besides the Festive Showgirl Kickaplaooza was to attend the New York Chocolate Show. If you think there is no limit to the amount of free gourmet dark chocolate you could eat, think again. The samples are so tiny! There are so many flavors! Why thank you, don't mind if I do! After about the 30th booth you feel like you have a fucking 85% cacao BRICK in your stomach.
We won't even get into what it did to the children.
here's some advice for you... 'take your PIN and go away'...
Registration starts this week kiddies, and you know what that means... three days booked solid with "advising" appointments. It's kind of a misnomer, since very few of my advisees ever need "advice". Most of them are freshman and sophomores who haven't picked a major yet. I look at their sheets (those of them who have filled them out... usually about half) and make sure they aren't registering for a schedule of 21 credits of intensive writing classes, I give them their registration PIN and send them on their way. Only about 3 or 4 of them will have questions or issues I can deal with... which usually involves knowing the name of the person to send them to talk to instead of me.
Anyway, the real issue is what it does to MY schedule, which is to cuff me to my desk for three days straight. It makes it hard to get any work done. And it falls during a particularly bad week this year... I have 4 meetings in 3 days. My iCal schedule is hemorrhaging. (Red = meeting)
At least I got the Astro midterms graded this weekend. Finally. With a few exceptions, the grades were ok. I instituted a fairly generous curve, though. There were 210 points on the exam. The highest grade missed 14 points, the lowest 125. (!!) This would have given a range of something like 40% - 96%. But instead of calculating the percentage score by using (210 - L)/210 (where "L" is the number of points you lost)... I used (210 - .8L)/200... which gave a range more like 55% - 98%. It bumped a few clear B papers up to A-, so I'm not totally satisfied with the equation, but I think it gives a pretty good distribution of A's, B's, and C's.
I'm finding it pretty hard to get excited about this astronomy class lately. It's a standard college astro progression... sky, planets, stars, galaxies, big bang... which is ok stuff, but there is no compelling organizational "theme", so the whole class just seems to wander from one topic to the next. I'm considering switching it the year after next to a "Life in the Universe" class. I could still talk about a lot of the same stuff, just with a different focus. For example, instead of just cataloguing galaxy types, I could talk about galactic structure as it pertains to the "zone of habitability" for life-friendly planetary systems. And I could bring the bio prof and the chem prof in to give guest lectures. And I got a really nice free copy of an "Astrobiology" textbook from Addison Wesley a few weeks ago that would make a great text. And we could watch UFO documentaries and mock them. I wonder if you can get the old "In Search Of..." series on DVD?
A few of my other courses are changing for the better too. I think I mentioned that I'm splitting my Modern Physics course (which covers a little relativity and a little QM) into two NEW courses... an introductory "QM for Poets" class and an upper-level Einstein class. This change happens next fall, and I'm really looking forward to it. It will give me a chance to do some more lab stuff in the QM class, and to get deeper into the math in the Einstein.
One place where I'm NOT happy about the situation is my new History and Philosophy of Science class. That course has been going SO well this year, that I was looking forward to it becoming a staple in our department for science majors. I designed the course to fill a clear hole in the curriculum, since the philosophy department had never really offered a philosophy of science course appropriate to our students. Well, guess what? Yeah. Now that I have this amazing course, the Philosophy Department has put forward their OWN philosophy of science course, that covers about 50% of the same material. So now I have to make nice and email the prof and the dept chair and ask to see a copy of the syllabus so we can compare notes and make sure we aren't covering material that is too similar, blah, blah, blah. It probably means that next time I teach it I will have to do less philosopy and more history, which is fine I guess. (I have a great history of science textbook, and it will give me an excuse to finally learn about "phlogiston" theory.) It just angers me that it may have been done kind of on purpose. Oh well. At least the guy who teaches it is a part timer, so I can pull rank a little.
Lastly, the head of the architecture department (which is in another division of the university) wants to sit down with my department chair and I and talk about the physics requirement for architecture majors. It turns out the architecture students have to take physics (many grad schools require it for admission) so the department has been sending students to our sister-instituion to take a physics class THERE, and the class they have been taking is one of these "Light and Color" classes for non-scientists that has NOTHING to do with the kinds of things an architect should really probably know about physics. So the question(s) will be, is MY introductory physics class a better fit, can I make changes to the class to make it an EVEN BETTER fit... and do I want it clogged up with architecture majors every semester? (A: Yes, I'd rather not, and HELL NO!)
Ok. That's enough going on-and-on about my classes. I think some nap-time is in order before the train rolls in.
Registration starts this week kiddies, and you know what that means... three days booked solid with "advising" appointments. It's kind of a misnomer, since very few of my advisees ever need "advice". Most of them are freshman and sophomores who haven't picked a major yet. I look at their sheets (those of them who have filled them out... usually about half) and make sure they aren't registering for a schedule of 21 credits of intensive writing classes, I give them their registration PIN and send them on their way. Only about 3 or 4 of them will have questions or issues I can deal with... which usually involves knowing the name of the person to send them to talk to instead of me.
Anyway, the real issue is what it does to MY schedule, which is to cuff me to my desk for three days straight. It makes it hard to get any work done. And it falls during a particularly bad week this year... I have 4 meetings in 3 days. My iCal schedule is hemorrhaging. (Red = meeting)
At least I got the Astro midterms graded this weekend. Finally. With a few exceptions, the grades were ok. I instituted a fairly generous curve, though. There were 210 points on the exam. The highest grade missed 14 points, the lowest 125. (!!) This would have given a range of something like 40% - 96%. But instead of calculating the percentage score by using (210 - L)/210 (where "L" is the number of points you lost)... I used (210 - .8L)/200... which gave a range more like 55% - 98%. It bumped a few clear B papers up to A-, so I'm not totally satisfied with the equation, but I think it gives a pretty good distribution of A's, B's, and C's.
I'm finding it pretty hard to get excited about this astronomy class lately. It's a standard college astro progression... sky, planets, stars, galaxies, big bang... which is ok stuff, but there is no compelling organizational "theme", so the whole class just seems to wander from one topic to the next. I'm considering switching it the year after next to a "Life in the Universe" class. I could still talk about a lot of the same stuff, just with a different focus. For example, instead of just cataloguing galaxy types, I could talk about galactic structure as it pertains to the "zone of habitability" for life-friendly planetary systems. And I could bring the bio prof and the chem prof in to give guest lectures. And I got a really nice free copy of an "Astrobiology" textbook from Addison Wesley a few weeks ago that would make a great text. And we could watch UFO documentaries and mock them. I wonder if you can get the old "In Search Of..." series on DVD?
A few of my other courses are changing for the better too. I think I mentioned that I'm splitting my Modern Physics course (which covers a little relativity and a little QM) into two NEW courses... an introductory "QM for Poets" class and an upper-level Einstein class. This change happens next fall, and I'm really looking forward to it. It will give me a chance to do some more lab stuff in the QM class, and to get deeper into the math in the Einstein.
One place where I'm NOT happy about the situation is my new History and Philosophy of Science class. That course has been going SO well this year, that I was looking forward to it becoming a staple in our department for science majors. I designed the course to fill a clear hole in the curriculum, since the philosophy department had never really offered a philosophy of science course appropriate to our students. Well, guess what? Yeah. Now that I have this amazing course, the Philosophy Department has put forward their OWN philosophy of science course, that covers about 50% of the same material. So now I have to make nice and email the prof and the dept chair and ask to see a copy of the syllabus so we can compare notes and make sure we aren't covering material that is too similar, blah, blah, blah. It probably means that next time I teach it I will have to do less philosopy and more history, which is fine I guess. (I have a great history of science textbook, and it will give me an excuse to finally learn about "phlogiston" theory.) It just angers me that it may have been done kind of on purpose. Oh well. At least the guy who teaches it is a part timer, so I can pull rank a little.
Lastly, the head of the architecture department (which is in another division of the university) wants to sit down with my department chair and I and talk about the physics requirement for architecture majors. It turns out the architecture students have to take physics (many grad schools require it for admission) so the department has been sending students to our sister-instituion to take a physics class THERE, and the class they have been taking is one of these "Light and Color" classes for non-scientists that has NOTHING to do with the kinds of things an architect should really probably know about physics. So the question(s) will be, is MY introductory physics class a better fit, can I make changes to the class to make it an EVEN BETTER fit... and do I want it clogged up with architecture majors every semester? (A: Yes, I'd rather not, and HELL NO!)
Ok. That's enough going on-and-on about my classes. I think some nap-time is in order before the train rolls in.
Sunday, November 12
Thursday, November 9
cough, cough...
I have a leeeeeetle sore throat... just a spot... just on one side... just a little sore. That's how it always starts.
Gee, I hope I don't come down with the flu so that I'm too sick tomorrow to go with the family to the Radio City Music Hall Rockettes Slutty-Yet-Wholesome High-Kicking "What Do Showgirls Have To Do With Christmas Again" CHRISTMAS SPECTACULAR!!
Because nothing teaches your kid the meaning of Christmas like two dozen 5'11" blondes in naughty-Santa's-helper outfits.
Ho-ho-ho!
(PS> This marks the first Dr. Dave Grinch/Humbug post of the Xmas season! Deck the halls, motherfuckers!)
I have a leeeeeetle sore throat... just a spot... just on one side... just a little sore. That's how it always starts.
Gee, I hope I don't come down with the flu so that I'm too sick tomorrow to go with the family to the Radio City Music Hall Rockettes Slutty-Yet-Wholesome High-Kicking "What Do Showgirls Have To Do With Christmas Again" CHRISTMAS SPECTACULAR!!
Because nothing teaches your kid the meaning of Christmas like two dozen 5'11" blondes in naughty-Santa's-helper outfits.
Ho-ho-ho!
(PS> This marks the first Dr. Dave Grinch/Humbug post of the Xmas season! Deck the halls, motherfuckers!)
Wednesday, November 8
fucking hell, people...
This train sounds like a god damned Chuck E. Cheese's... there are TWO people playing video games (one PSP, one cellphone) out loud with no fucking headphones, and another guy listening to music on his laptop so loud that he might was well NOT be using headphones. It's 8:00 in the morning, assholes... keep it the fuck down.
Also... "boink! boink! boink!" What the fuck are you playing? Q-bert??
This train sounds like a god damned Chuck E. Cheese's... there are TWO people playing video games (one PSP, one cellphone) out loud with no fucking headphones, and another guy listening to music on his laptop so loud that he might was well NOT be using headphones. It's 8:00 in the morning, assholes... keep it the fuck down.
Also... "boink! boink! boink!" What the fuck are you playing? Q-bert??
paperwork...
I've put aside my exam grading once again (go ahead kids, give me bad evaluations because of it, I dare you!) to focus on a piece of Administrivia that needs to get done today. When I came back to this job, I took over the maintenance of the Student Handbook for science majors. Because before that, there really WAS no Student Handbook for science majors. What there was instead was a list of about a dozen documents... course lists, graduation check-off sheets, senior project guidelines... each with who-knows-how-many different versions, and each located on a different hard drive/web page/email/stack of papers on somebody's desk. It was a mess. So two years ago I gathered up every pertinent file and organized them into a single document with one page style and the same damned font and an honest-to-goodness table of contents. This file stays on MY hard drive, it has a version numbering system, and if anybody wants to make changes to it, they submit them to me on paper. The only electronic version that gets distributed is a non-editable .pdf file. My master version is an Apple Pages file which means that it looks gorgeous, and that nobody else can edit it even if they try, cuz I'm the only guy with this program. Sounds like a good setup, right?
Huge mistake on my part.
Because this means every semester, I have to make a whole bunch of changes and compare 3 paper versions of the thing to the electronic version and make sure the changes all make sense, and certain people in the department who were used to being in charge of these documents and changing them whenever they wanted, loooooooove to make changes and tinker with stuff and add stuff that really doesn't need to be added, and I think this person just really wants control of these documents back and is going to keep making their changes more and more complicated until I give up and say, "OK! HERE'S THE FILE!! YOU DO IT!"
Anyway. That's what I'm doing this morning. Or SHOULD be, rather.
I've put aside my exam grading once again (go ahead kids, give me bad evaluations because of it, I dare you!) to focus on a piece of Administrivia that needs to get done today. When I came back to this job, I took over the maintenance of the Student Handbook for science majors. Because before that, there really WAS no Student Handbook for science majors. What there was instead was a list of about a dozen documents... course lists, graduation check-off sheets, senior project guidelines... each with who-knows-how-many different versions, and each located on a different hard drive/web page/email/stack of papers on somebody's desk. It was a mess. So two years ago I gathered up every pertinent file and organized them into a single document with one page style and the same damned font and an honest-to-goodness table of contents. This file stays on MY hard drive, it has a version numbering system, and if anybody wants to make changes to it, they submit them to me on paper. The only electronic version that gets distributed is a non-editable .pdf file. My master version is an Apple Pages file which means that it looks gorgeous, and that nobody else can edit it even if they try, cuz I'm the only guy with this program. Sounds like a good setup, right?
Huge mistake on my part.
Because this means every semester, I have to make a whole bunch of changes and compare 3 paper versions of the thing to the electronic version and make sure the changes all make sense, and certain people in the department who were used to being in charge of these documents and changing them whenever they wanted, loooooooove to make changes and tinker with stuff and add stuff that really doesn't need to be added, and I think this person just really wants control of these documents back and is going to keep making their changes more and more complicated until I give up and say, "OK! HERE'S THE FILE!! YOU DO IT!"
Anyway. That's what I'm doing this morning. Or SHOULD be, rather.
dave's election wrap up...
1) Thank god for the House. Even if the Senate doesn't come around when the counting is done, at least we'll have something that looks like an actual government for the next two years, instead of the current Post-Palpatine Imperial Senate sham legislature.
2) I would really love to see a national election go by without hearing the words "too close to call". When the decision between Democrat and Republican comes down with the same statistical properties as a coin toss, it indicates to me that there is something fundamentally wrong. Ok, if it happens now and then, fine... laws of probability and all. But when it happens ALL THE TIME, it suggests that people are essentially just picking one side or the other completely at random. That doesn't seem right.
3) The fucking Green Party needs to pack up and go home and stop it. Now. Seriously. Stop sucking off 1% of the vote from the Democrats just so you can make your whackjob "point" that the Democrats are too conservative. It's not about making a point anymore. The vote is split too evenly to allow your making a point to hand senate races and electoral college votes to the Republicans. Suck it up and vote for the LESSER of two evils, just like the fucking rest of us. If Webb loses in Virginia, and that seat makes the difference between Democratic Senate and Republican Senate, you assholes have fucked us over yet again. Stop it.
4) I'm happy to see my home state of Maryland move back to a Democratic governor. I don't know what the hell happened while I was gone... MD used to be as reliably Democratic as anywhere. Keep it up Maryland. Don't make me come down there.
5) I hadn't really made much of the fact that the majority of Governor's races went Democratic as well, until somebody on the radio this morning brought up the fact that having a Governor act as a spokesperson for candidates can really help in the Presidential election, and this is especially important in close states like Ohio, which went with the Democratic candidate for Governor last night. So... if this fact is true and not just anecdotal... yay for that.
6) I'm trying to figure out where I can go to watch Bush's press conference at 1:00. I'm not sure why I feel the need to watch it. Just to make sure he doesn't declare the election invalid, dissolve the congress, and declare martial law, I guess.
(AFTERNOON PS> Rumsfeld? Really? Well, THAT'S about a week too late, dumbass!)
1) Thank god for the House. Even if the Senate doesn't come around when the counting is done, at least we'll have something that looks like an actual government for the next two years, instead of the current Post-Palpatine Imperial Senate sham legislature.
2) I would really love to see a national election go by without hearing the words "too close to call". When the decision between Democrat and Republican comes down with the same statistical properties as a coin toss, it indicates to me that there is something fundamentally wrong. Ok, if it happens now and then, fine... laws of probability and all. But when it happens ALL THE TIME, it suggests that people are essentially just picking one side or the other completely at random. That doesn't seem right.
3) The fucking Green Party needs to pack up and go home and stop it. Now. Seriously. Stop sucking off 1% of the vote from the Democrats just so you can make your whackjob "point" that the Democrats are too conservative. It's not about making a point anymore. The vote is split too evenly to allow your making a point to hand senate races and electoral college votes to the Republicans. Suck it up and vote for the LESSER of two evils, just like the fucking rest of us. If Webb loses in Virginia, and that seat makes the difference between Democratic Senate and Republican Senate, you assholes have fucked us over yet again. Stop it.
4) I'm happy to see my home state of Maryland move back to a Democratic governor. I don't know what the hell happened while I was gone... MD used to be as reliably Democratic as anywhere. Keep it up Maryland. Don't make me come down there.
5) I hadn't really made much of the fact that the majority of Governor's races went Democratic as well, until somebody on the radio this morning brought up the fact that having a Governor act as a spokesperson for candidates can really help in the Presidential election, and this is especially important in close states like Ohio, which went with the Democratic candidate for Governor last night. So... if this fact is true and not just anecdotal... yay for that.
6) I'm trying to figure out where I can go to watch Bush's press conference at 1:00. I'm not sure why I feel the need to watch it. Just to make sure he doesn't declare the election invalid, dissolve the congress, and declare martial law, I guess.
(AFTERNOON PS> Rumsfeld? Really? Well, THAT'S about a week too late, dumbass!)
Tuesday, November 7
grading mechanics...
Today I was discussing the advantages and disadvantages of the 12345, 12345, 12345 method of grading versus the 11111... 22222... 33333 method. In other words, when faced with a big stack of exams, do you grade each exam through start to finish, one at a time, or do you grade everyone's page one, then everyone's page two... etc? I think the advantages of each method are fairly clear. The 11111... 22222... method leads to greater consistency. You are more likely to give the same grade to questions that are similarly fucked-up, because you see all the # 3's right in a row, and are more likely to remember the mistakes made by different students on the same problem and treat them accordingly.
I do not do this.
I grade everyone's exam start to finish, because I need to see that pile of FINISHED papers growing and growing over time. It's about accomplishment! And also, I think it gives me a clearer picture of how each student is doing on the exam overall. Most of my classes are somewhat small, also... and I think that makes a difference. I can feel my consistency drifting slightly from the beginning of the stack to the end, but I don't think it ever amounts to any sort of major unfairness.
But today I decided to go through the astro exams with the 11111... 22222... method. Hate it! And I find it impossible to resist the temptation to peek onto the next page of everybody's exam and start making marks there. Then I finish the whole stack and instead of being done, it's like... "Ok, well.. I have to do that FIVE MORE TIMES!!" I think I'll be returning to my old method.
Anyway. Just thinking about that today. There are no conclusions to be drawn.
Riding the train home. Tired, tired, tired. Gotta vote. Then home. Feed/bathe kids. Put to bed. Have paperwork to do. Not much TV to watch except for election returns. Should go to bed at a decent hour. Or else...? Tired, tired, tired again tomorrow.
Today I was discussing the advantages and disadvantages of the 12345, 12345, 12345 method of grading versus the 11111... 22222... 33333 method. In other words, when faced with a big stack of exams, do you grade each exam through start to finish, one at a time, or do you grade everyone's page one, then everyone's page two... etc? I think the advantages of each method are fairly clear. The 11111... 22222... method leads to greater consistency. You are more likely to give the same grade to questions that are similarly fucked-up, because you see all the # 3's right in a row, and are more likely to remember the mistakes made by different students on the same problem and treat them accordingly.
I do not do this.
I grade everyone's exam start to finish, because I need to see that pile of FINISHED papers growing and growing over time. It's about accomplishment! And also, I think it gives me a clearer picture of how each student is doing on the exam overall. Most of my classes are somewhat small, also... and I think that makes a difference. I can feel my consistency drifting slightly from the beginning of the stack to the end, but I don't think it ever amounts to any sort of major unfairness.
But today I decided to go through the astro exams with the 11111... 22222... method. Hate it! And I find it impossible to resist the temptation to peek onto the next page of everybody's exam and start making marks there. Then I finish the whole stack and instead of being done, it's like... "Ok, well.. I have to do that FIVE MORE TIMES!!" I think I'll be returning to my old method.
Anyway. Just thinking about that today. There are no conclusions to be drawn.
Riding the train home. Tired, tired, tired. Gotta vote. Then home. Feed/bathe kids. Put to bed. Have paperwork to do. Not much TV to watch except for election returns. Should go to bed at a decent hour. Or else...? Tired, tired, tired again tomorrow.
dave rocks the vote...
Last night I finally got around to visiting the web page of my county board of elections to figure out where my polling place is. (Last year there were nothing but local races up, and I didn't feel the need as a new resident to bother with them.) I couldn't find the hours, though. I guess I'll just stop by on the way home from work.
I also went online to find the polling place of a lazy red-state friend who was thinking about not voting. I figure that is like an extra vote for me. And it makes more sense for me to get that extra vote in a red state, since here in NY, Hillary is up like 72% to 15%. I don't think the Dems in NY really need my help.
Anyway, despite my "no-hopes-up" stance, I fully expect to be glued to some kind of media outlet tonight with a printed-out Senate map checking off seats.
Last night I finally got around to visiting the web page of my county board of elections to figure out where my polling place is. (Last year there were nothing but local races up, and I didn't feel the need as a new resident to bother with them.) I couldn't find the hours, though. I guess I'll just stop by on the way home from work.
I also went online to find the polling place of a lazy red-state friend who was thinking about not voting. I figure that is like an extra vote for me. And it makes more sense for me to get that extra vote in a red state, since here in NY, Hillary is up like 72% to 15%. I don't think the Dems in NY really need my help.
Anyway, despite my "no-hopes-up" stance, I fully expect to be glued to some kind of media outlet tonight with a printed-out Senate map checking off seats.
"this one goes to 400 Mb/sec..."
I saw an ad on dealmac.com the other day for a sale price on this electric guitar with a built in USB port so you can plug it in to your computer directly for digital recording purposes.
I am sorry, but there is something so UN-rock-and-roll about a guitar with a fucking USB port... I can't even get my head around it.
And yet... for $99...
I think Computer-Geek-Dave and Rock-and-Roll-Dave are going to have to fight this one out. We'll get back to you.
I saw an ad on dealmac.com the other day for a sale price on this electric guitar with a built in USB port so you can plug it in to your computer directly for digital recording purposes.
I am sorry, but there is something so UN-rock-and-roll about a guitar with a fucking USB port... I can't even get my head around it.
And yet... for $99...
I think Computer-Geek-Dave and Rock-and-Roll-Dave are going to have to fight this one out. We'll get back to you.
belated halloween book review...
Apropos to the topic, I finished "The Historian" by Elizabeth Kostova on Halloween night. A few days earlier, when the wife noticed I was about 50 pages from the end, she said "Oh, are you finally almost finished with that?" to which I replied, "Yes, I'm getting close to the end and THERE BETTER BE A FUCKING PAYOFF AFTER ALL THIS!!!"
Well, there is a payoff, but I'm still not 100% sure it was worth the convoluted 500 page train ride through Eastern Europe to get there. I'm not sure I can recommend it unless you really, really like detailed descriptions of Byzantine churches and complicated nesting narrative structures.
I sat in the hotel room reading the letter that my father wrote. "My dear daughter. I can continue now with the story that my friend and mentor Professor Rossi related to me on that day. He took me aside in his office and told me - 'Once I was in Romania and I met a women who knew of this legend. I asked her to tell me everything she knew. She showed me a letter. The letter read. "I, Brother Bartholomew, have discovered a rare document from 11th century Hungary that makes reference to the pilgrimage of monks from Constantinople to Wallachia. The document begins... 'In the year...'"'"'"
I'm sorry? What year? Who is talking? What country are we in? What century is it?
Anyway. There are vampires. So, it's kinda like the DaVinci Code meets Anne Rice, but more realistic. And less gay.
(I should post that review to Amazon.)
Apropos to the topic, I finished "The Historian" by Elizabeth Kostova on Halloween night. A few days earlier, when the wife noticed I was about 50 pages from the end, she said "Oh, are you finally almost finished with that?" to which I replied, "Yes, I'm getting close to the end and THERE BETTER BE A FUCKING PAYOFF AFTER ALL THIS!!!"
Well, there is a payoff, but I'm still not 100% sure it was worth the convoluted 500 page train ride through Eastern Europe to get there. I'm not sure I can recommend it unless you really, really like detailed descriptions of Byzantine churches and complicated nesting narrative structures.
I sat in the hotel room reading the letter that my father wrote. "My dear daughter. I can continue now with the story that my friend and mentor Professor Rossi related to me on that day. He took me aside in his office and told me - 'Once I was in Romania and I met a women who knew of this legend. I asked her to tell me everything she knew. She showed me a letter. The letter read. "I, Brother Bartholomew, have discovered a rare document from 11th century Hungary that makes reference to the pilgrimage of monks from Constantinople to Wallachia. The document begins... 'In the year...'"'"'"
I'm sorry? What year? Who is talking? What country are we in? What century is it?
Anyway. There are vampires. So, it's kinda like the DaVinci Code meets Anne Rice, but more realistic. And less gay.
(I should post that review to Amazon.)
Monday, November 6
burnt...
...out. I could not feel less like working or writing or blogging or... pretty much anything right now. We had a yet another science department meeting tonight that I kinda blew off without telling anyone. The official story will be something like "Meeting? Monday? There was? Oops!", but the truth is, I just honestly can't deal with it today. The weekend was too long and too draining. Before I can face working again, especially grading, I first have to re-acquire my will to live. I managed to stumble my was through class today, and do a minimum amount of paperwork for this thing that needs to be done by Wednesday. That's it. I'm done.
Tomorrow is election day, and I feel like I should blog SOMETHING about that, but I'll probably wait until it's OVER. I am refusing to allow myself to get any hopes up. I am being steadfastly pessimistic about the prospects of a Democratic congress, because I don't want to be disappointed/depressed on Wednesday morning when the numbers don't *quite* add up.
I just don't have it in me to get all political lately. When the news came out about Saddam Hussein being sentenced to death, all I could manage was a general sigh of dissatisfaction. What does one more dead person really gain us over there, really? It's not even that I'm opposed to the death penalty in any kind of absolute sense (although I personally have no confidence in the ability of our country's justice system to apply it fairly) I just get no sense that after it is done that anything will have changed. All the same people will still hate all the some other people. It just seems like a waste of rope in the end. I get the idea that the people on the news want us to "feel" something about it, though.
Nope.
Anyway. It's Monday. Maybe the teevee will cheer me up.
...out. I could not feel less like working or writing or blogging or... pretty much anything right now. We had a yet another science department meeting tonight that I kinda blew off without telling anyone. The official story will be something like "Meeting? Monday? There was? Oops!", but the truth is, I just honestly can't deal with it today. The weekend was too long and too draining. Before I can face working again, especially grading, I first have to re-acquire my will to live. I managed to stumble my was through class today, and do a minimum amount of paperwork for this thing that needs to be done by Wednesday. That's it. I'm done.
Tomorrow is election day, and I feel like I should blog SOMETHING about that, but I'll probably wait until it's OVER. I am refusing to allow myself to get any hopes up. I am being steadfastly pessimistic about the prospects of a Democratic congress, because I don't want to be disappointed/depressed on Wednesday morning when the numbers don't *quite* add up.
I just don't have it in me to get all political lately. When the news came out about Saddam Hussein being sentenced to death, all I could manage was a general sigh of dissatisfaction. What does one more dead person really gain us over there, really? It's not even that I'm opposed to the death penalty in any kind of absolute sense (although I personally have no confidence in the ability of our country's justice system to apply it fairly) I just get no sense that after it is done that anything will have changed. All the same people will still hate all the some other people. It just seems like a waste of rope in the end. I get the idea that the people on the news want us to "feel" something about it, though.
Nope.
Anyway. It's Monday. Maybe the teevee will cheer me up.
weekend wrap-up...
No time to blog all weekend, what with the crazy schedule of events and the molasses-slow hotel internet connection. No time to blog NOW, really, what with the week's worth of neglected grading and unthoughtabout classes, but... that sort of thing seldom stops me.
The presentation was fine - sparsely attended but well-received. One guy told me it was the best talk he'd seen during the whole conference. Somebody told me something similar at the last conference as well. I'm not in it for the compliments, of course, but it's nice to hear.
After my talk I went back to the hotel to change, grabbed a tea and a brownie at Starbucks and then walked back to Harborplace to have lunch with the wife and kids at the Cheesecake Factory (a two-hour + order with the wait beforehand) ate seriously too fucking much, then drove up to the wife's cousin's (for more food) that evening. Sunday we met for brunch at a greasy diner with my Dad and my Grandmom and I ordered the french toast + eggs + bacon + sausage + heart disease special. I dread getting on the scale this week.
The kids were slightly sick and sleep deprived and generally unpleasant a lot of the time, but it didn't really peak until we got home last night. I heated up some leftover pizza for them, and called them down for dinner, and the Boy walked into the kitchen, picked up his plate, and said "I didn't even WANT pizza". Then he dumped his slice straight into the trash can. Then I beat him unconscious. It's been much quieter since then.
The whole NaNonFicMo idea has been back-burnered, naturally, with all that's been going on. I still want to write every day this month, but instead of a single project, I'm thinking I should spread things around a little. I'm going to pull up some half-written manuscripts and get those polished up and ready to send in. The more we work on these "guidelines for scholarship", the more it looks like things at the college are going to become significantly more publish-or-perishy over the next 5 years or so. And I'd REALLY rather not perish at this point in my career. So it's time to step up from this "two conference talks a year" plan and get a few short articles published. Somewhere around here I have a list of "crappy little journals where I could probably easily get a paper in". Maybe I'll start there.
No time to blog all weekend, what with the crazy schedule of events and the molasses-slow hotel internet connection. No time to blog NOW, really, what with the week's worth of neglected grading and unthoughtabout classes, but... that sort of thing seldom stops me.
The presentation was fine - sparsely attended but well-received. One guy told me it was the best talk he'd seen during the whole conference. Somebody told me something similar at the last conference as well. I'm not in it for the compliments, of course, but it's nice to hear.
After my talk I went back to the hotel to change, grabbed a tea and a brownie at Starbucks and then walked back to Harborplace to have lunch with the wife and kids at the Cheesecake Factory (a two-hour + order with the wait beforehand) ate seriously too fucking much, then drove up to the wife's cousin's (for more food) that evening. Sunday we met for brunch at a greasy diner with my Dad and my Grandmom and I ordered the french toast + eggs + bacon + sausage + heart disease special. I dread getting on the scale this week.
The kids were slightly sick and sleep deprived and generally unpleasant a lot of the time, but it didn't really peak until we got home last night. I heated up some leftover pizza for them, and called them down for dinner, and the Boy walked into the kitchen, picked up his plate, and said "I didn't even WANT pizza". Then he dumped his slice straight into the trash can. Then I beat him unconscious. It's been much quieter since then.
The whole NaNonFicMo idea has been back-burnered, naturally, with all that's been going on. I still want to write every day this month, but instead of a single project, I'm thinking I should spread things around a little. I'm going to pull up some half-written manuscripts and get those polished up and ready to send in. The more we work on these "guidelines for scholarship", the more it looks like things at the college are going to become significantly more publish-or-perishy over the next 5 years or so. And I'd REALLY rather not perish at this point in my career. So it's time to step up from this "two conference talks a year" plan and get a few short articles published. Somewhere around here I have a list of "crappy little journals where I could probably easily get a paper in". Maybe I'll start there.
Saturday, November 4
presentation...
It's a little before 9:00 AM, my talk is at 9:30. I've gone over the Keynote presentation one final time... everything seems to be in order, and I think I can drag out what I have to say to fill the whole hour. I peeked at my room... it's SMALL, but holds ~70 chairs. I got on the shuttle bus this morning and the first person I talked to was planning on attending my talk. This bodes well for attendance. I feel like I'm wasting time if I go all the way to a conference and get less than 50 attendees.
Back in the hotel room, the daughter with pneumonia is doing much better, but the boy started getting fevery last night. My wife had planned on taking them to the "Port Discovery" children's museum today while I do the conference. We'll see. She may just wind up trapped in the hotel room with them, which is only fair, since I was trapped in the hotel room with them yesterday ("I'm boooooooooooored") while my wife attended a day of "Stitches East" some kind of knitting expo that I don't even pretend to understand. It's at the same conference center as my NSTA convention, though, so it's kind of fun to sit around the public areas and play "Science Nerd or Knitting Nerd?".
We had dinner with my Mom last night at one of those Japanese steakhouse places. It was fun to watch the kids watch the chef. Nothing impresses a 3-year-old like an onion-volcano. Tonight we are visiting my wife's cousins who live way "upstate" (I know Maryland isn't really big enough to have an "upstate" but they live about as far away as you can live and still be in Maryland) and tomorrow we are having brunch with my Dad and my Grandmom. Two conferences and three family visits in three days with 2 sick kids. Welcome to my life.
It's a little before 9:00 AM, my talk is at 9:30. I've gone over the Keynote presentation one final time... everything seems to be in order, and I think I can drag out what I have to say to fill the whole hour. I peeked at my room... it's SMALL, but holds ~70 chairs. I got on the shuttle bus this morning and the first person I talked to was planning on attending my talk. This bodes well for attendance. I feel like I'm wasting time if I go all the way to a conference and get less than 50 attendees.
Back in the hotel room, the daughter with pneumonia is doing much better, but the boy started getting fevery last night. My wife had planned on taking them to the "Port Discovery" children's museum today while I do the conference. We'll see. She may just wind up trapped in the hotel room with them, which is only fair, since I was trapped in the hotel room with them yesterday ("I'm boooooooooooored") while my wife attended a day of "Stitches East" some kind of knitting expo that I don't even pretend to understand. It's at the same conference center as my NSTA convention, though, so it's kind of fun to sit around the public areas and play "Science Nerd or Knitting Nerd?".
We had dinner with my Mom last night at one of those Japanese steakhouse places. It was fun to watch the kids watch the chef. Nothing impresses a 3-year-old like an onion-volcano. Tonight we are visiting my wife's cousins who live way "upstate" (I know Maryland isn't really big enough to have an "upstate" but they live about as far away as you can live and still be in Maryland) and tomorrow we are having brunch with my Dad and my Grandmom. Two conferences and three family visits in three days with 2 sick kids. Welcome to my life.
Thursday, November 2
boys are weird...
At this very moment, the Boy is in the bathtub singing a song of his own devising which combines the melody of the My Little Pony theme song with the repeated lyrical motif - "Boba Fett".
I'm not even going to ask.
At this very moment, the Boy is in the bathtub singing a song of his own devising which combines the melody of the My Little Pony theme song with the repeated lyrical motif - "Boba Fett".
"Bo-Boba Fett Fett,
Bo-Boba Fett Fett,
Boba, Bobaaaaa - Boba Fett.
Boba F' Fett Fett,
Boba F' Fett Fett,
Boba, Boba, Boba Boba, Boba Fe-e-ett..."
I'm not even going to ask.
all that was missing was the lab coat...
I did a demonstration in physics class today! You should have seen it... there were beakers and everything... it was like... I dunno... like a fucking science class or something!
In other news, I checked the NaNo page, and it IS only a 1000 words a day. I don't know why I thought it was more. Not sure how well I'll be able to focus on writing for the next few days, what with the looming conference presentation and all. Oh, also... my daughter has pneumonia. How fucked up is that? She's had a fever on and off for 3 days, and my wife took her to the doctor today. They aren't too worried, they put her on high-dose Zithromax for 5 days. Hopefully she'll start to get better this weekend. We have all kinds of crap planned in Baltimore. Dragging a wheezing feverish child around with us will likely make us feel like bad parents.
Anyway... just pounded down a half a grande tea, dozed off for 20 min, then finished the other half. So... zing! Off to work on the presentation.
I did a demonstration in physics class today! You should have seen it... there were beakers and everything... it was like... I dunno... like a fucking science class or something!
In other news, I checked the NaNo page, and it IS only a 1000 words a day. I don't know why I thought it was more. Not sure how well I'll be able to focus on writing for the next few days, what with the looming conference presentation and all. Oh, also... my daughter has pneumonia. How fucked up is that? She's had a fever on and off for 3 days, and my wife took her to the doctor today. They aren't too worried, they put her on high-dose Zithromax for 5 days. Hopefully she'll start to get better this weekend. We have all kinds of crap planned in Baltimore. Dragging a wheezing feverish child around with us will likely make us feel like bad parents.
Anyway... just pounded down a half a grande tea, dozed off for 20 min, then finished the other half. So... zing! Off to work on the presentation.
NaNonFicMo...
I don't even really know what the word-count goals are for the real NaNoWriMo. My guess is that it's pretty high. I'm going to commit myself to the entirely reachable goal of 1000 words a day. More would be good, but if I could have 60 pages or so worth of my "textbook" project in the bag over the next month or so, that would make me very happy. So far since yesterday I've written 1200.
I will say that the train ride goes insanely quickly when you write non-stop for the whole two hours. I also had to compose a quick letter to the provost about a mistake in my appointment review letter. This is the kind of administrative blah-di-blah that I really can't deal with. The very fact that I read the letter 3 or 4 times in September without noticing the mistake is testament to the fact that contracty-legalese and I just don't get along.
Anyway. Now it's time to work on Saturday's powerpoint for the conference. I'm not quite as ready for that as I probably should be!
I don't even really know what the word-count goals are for the real NaNoWriMo. My guess is that it's pretty high. I'm going to commit myself to the entirely reachable goal of 1000 words a day. More would be good, but if I could have 60 pages or so worth of my "textbook" project in the bag over the next month or so, that would make me very happy. So far since yesterday I've written 1200.
I will say that the train ride goes insanely quickly when you write non-stop for the whole two hours. I also had to compose a quick letter to the provost about a mistake in my appointment review letter. This is the kind of administrative blah-di-blah that I really can't deal with. The very fact that I read the letter 3 or 4 times in September without noticing the mistake is testament to the fact that contracty-legalese and I just don't get along.
Anyway. Now it's time to work on Saturday's powerpoint for the conference. I'm not quite as ready for that as I probably should be!
Wednesday, November 1
new feature... lecture snippets...
Not sure how often I'll do this, but I figure it's so rare that Dr. Dave goes for the laugh in class, I figured I'd post it just for fun.
(~4 Mb quicktime .wav)
Not sure how often I'll do this, but I figure it's so rare that Dr. Dave goes for the laugh in class, I figured I'd post it just for fun.
(~4 Mb quicktime .wav)
my life in 7 panels...
I'm usually not one of those link-posty bloggers, but this cartoon so captures my life that I have to share.
I'm usually not one of those link-posty bloggers, but this cartoon so captures my life that I have to share.
Monday, October 30
speaking of...
"I should be grading". That should really be the name of this weblog. If I ever completely re-constitute this thing... THAT is the new title. I should head over to blogger and grab that URL right now.
In completely unrelated news... people who claim that the "Fall Back" of Daylight Savings Time gives you an "extra hour of sleep" obviously have never had kids. Because when you have kids, the time change means an entire week's worth of kids getting up at 6:00 AM, because children don't operate according to clocks, they operate according to some combination of sunlight cues and Lucky-Charmes fueled bio-rhythms.
Speaking of Lucky Charms, I've always been curious about those store-brand generic cereals. You know... "Toasty-Os" and "Choco Chunks" and "Tiger Flakes" or whatever. I mean... how complicated can the formulas to sugary breakfast cereal be? It seems like the copying them couldn't be too hard. So one day a few weeks ago I picked up a box of "Magic Stars" for the kids, just on a whim. Boy was I wrong. These things are NASTY! The crunchy bits aren't quite right, the marshmallows shapes don't have the proper styrofoamy texture... it's just all wrong. Oddly enough, though, the Boy prefers them to the actual leprechaun-endorsed real thing. So now we have to buy them BOTH. And now I find myself constructing imaginary ripoff cartoon mascots for the cheap ripoff breakfast cereals. Like maybe an angry Scottish gnome. "Aye, they're aboot to pilfer me Magic Starrrs!!"
Speaking of Lucky Charms, I've started eating fistfulls of them again. Between that and Halloween candy, the diet has pretty much gone to hell lately.
Speaking of Halloween... we carved pumpkins last night. Meaning... the kids drew faces on pumpkins, I carved two and a half jack-o-lanterns myself, and the wife made the whole process take twice as long as it ever should by insisting in saving the pumpkin seeds and goop. You can BUY roasted pumpkin seeds for like 99 cents, y'know? You can also buy Halloween costumes instead of sewing for 48 hours straight every Oct 29th, but god knows... only the parents of future sociopaths make their children wear store-bought costumes!
Speaking of costumes... while we were out shopping for bits of this and that for the "Glinda The Good Witch" costume, on Saturday, we swung by Circuit City to pick up my belated birthday present - a Sirius radio for my car. My wife thought she bought one for my actual birthday but it turns out it was just a mounting kit! ("Wow, thanks, honey, I... umm... honey...?") I can't say I blame her... the packaging was VERY unclear. I didn't realize it until I opened it. Anyway. I have a Sirius One now, which is the little tiny visor-mounted one with the one-line display. I think this thing was designed by a bunch of guys who were fired from Microsoft for not thinking hard enough about good user-interface design. It took me 20 minutes to figure out how to set the fucking FM presets. And the FM transmitter on it kinda sucks, so I get a little background static no matter what channel I use or where I mount the thing. Right now it is clipped to my parking brake handle, which is actually far more convenient than it sounds. The static bums me out, though... and I'm now convinced I need a new car stereo... one with a front AUX jack for the Sirius and the iPod. I just need to convince the WIFE of this "need".
Speaking of the iPod... I spent a good bit of the weekend fucking with it. I had downloaded a bunch of crap from Google video... bootleg Pearl Jam concerts... Bronowski's "Ascent of Man" series (complete but for episode 9, DAMMIT!)... a BBC documentary about the Goths and Barbarians by Terry Jones... and when I tried to put these things on my iPod... none of them worked. They would show up in the "Movies" list, but when you hit play, it would just play the audio, and show a still from the movie as "album art". I fucked with these movies in every way I knew how to fuck with them, and it wasn't until I put a movie back on there that I knew had worked in the past and the same thing happened, that I decided the problem WASN'T with the Google videos... it was with the iPod. I eventually did a full reformat and reloaded everything and it all works fine now... all the movies play normally. I suspect the problem was related to the fact that I was manually managing the contents on the thing by connecting it to TWO different Macs, which it appears not to like very much. So I'm gonna have to rethink all my music-library-management plans.
I spent an equal amount of time fucking with the TiVo and copying videos off of that (download from TiVo to PC, process videos to mpeg2, ftp to iBook, burn to firewire drive) only to find that two of the shows I recorded were nothing but an hour of blackness, due to a problem we have with our bedroom cablebox intermittently and inexplicably shutting itself off. Fuck. And one of them isn't due to be shown again any time in the near future. It was for my class, too. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.
Speaking of movies... I also figured out how to use the programs MacTheRipper and DVD2OneX to do things to DVDs that one really should not be doing to DVDs, unless one is backing up one's own store-bought DVD collection for safekeeping. Which is of course all I would ever use it for. Welcome, visitors from the MPAA, FBI, and Interpol!! (Is it me, or are videos with the Interpol warning just inherently scarier than the FBI warning? Like, if you copy a video from Europe they send some '00-level agents out after your ass.) This DVD2One program is like magic. It puts a full length DVD movie onto a SINGLE regular 4.3 gig disc, which means it must be compressing the video quite a bit, but really... I couldn't tell. Of course, the video I copied was March of the Penguins, which you could replace with a blank white screen for half the film without affecting the overall impression. Anyway. It works.
Speaking of work... I should do some, so I think I'll put an end to this. And put some headphones on to drown out the snoring fucker behind me.
Oh... speaking of irritating fuckers... one more thing... the "what to blog about" book claims that you should try not to always bitch and moan and complain about stuff in your blog all the time, because nobody wants to read a blog written by a grouchy old curmudgeon every day. That's not true, readers... is it?? IS IT???
"I should be grading". That should really be the name of this weblog. If I ever completely re-constitute this thing... THAT is the new title. I should head over to blogger and grab that URL right now.
In completely unrelated news... people who claim that the "Fall Back" of Daylight Savings Time gives you an "extra hour of sleep" obviously have never had kids. Because when you have kids, the time change means an entire week's worth of kids getting up at 6:00 AM, because children don't operate according to clocks, they operate according to some combination of sunlight cues and Lucky-Charmes fueled bio-rhythms.
Speaking of Lucky Charms, I've always been curious about those store-brand generic cereals. You know... "Toasty-Os" and "Choco Chunks" and "Tiger Flakes" or whatever. I mean... how complicated can the formulas to sugary breakfast cereal be? It seems like the copying them couldn't be too hard. So one day a few weeks ago I picked up a box of "Magic Stars" for the kids, just on a whim. Boy was I wrong. These things are NASTY! The crunchy bits aren't quite right, the marshmallows shapes don't have the proper styrofoamy texture... it's just all wrong. Oddly enough, though, the Boy prefers them to the actual leprechaun-endorsed real thing. So now we have to buy them BOTH. And now I find myself constructing imaginary ripoff cartoon mascots for the cheap ripoff breakfast cereals. Like maybe an angry Scottish gnome. "Aye, they're aboot to pilfer me Magic Starrrs!!"
Speaking of Lucky Charms, I've started eating fistfulls of them again. Between that and Halloween candy, the diet has pretty much gone to hell lately.
Speaking of Halloween... we carved pumpkins last night. Meaning... the kids drew faces on pumpkins, I carved two and a half jack-o-lanterns myself, and the wife made the whole process take twice as long as it ever should by insisting in saving the pumpkin seeds and goop. You can BUY roasted pumpkin seeds for like 99 cents, y'know? You can also buy Halloween costumes instead of sewing for 48 hours straight every Oct 29th, but god knows... only the parents of future sociopaths make their children wear store-bought costumes!
Speaking of costumes... while we were out shopping for bits of this and that for the "Glinda The Good Witch" costume, on Saturday, we swung by Circuit City to pick up my belated birthday present - a Sirius radio for my car. My wife thought she bought one for my actual birthday but it turns out it was just a mounting kit! ("Wow, thanks, honey, I... umm... honey...?") I can't say I blame her... the packaging was VERY unclear. I didn't realize it until I opened it. Anyway. I have a Sirius One now, which is the little tiny visor-mounted one with the one-line display. I think this thing was designed by a bunch of guys who were fired from Microsoft for not thinking hard enough about good user-interface design. It took me 20 minutes to figure out how to set the fucking FM presets. And the FM transmitter on it kinda sucks, so I get a little background static no matter what channel I use or where I mount the thing. Right now it is clipped to my parking brake handle, which is actually far more convenient than it sounds. The static bums me out, though... and I'm now convinced I need a new car stereo... one with a front AUX jack for the Sirius and the iPod. I just need to convince the WIFE of this "need".
Speaking of the iPod... I spent a good bit of the weekend fucking with it. I had downloaded a bunch of crap from Google video... bootleg Pearl Jam concerts... Bronowski's "Ascent of Man" series (complete but for episode 9, DAMMIT!)... a BBC documentary about the Goths and Barbarians by Terry Jones... and when I tried to put these things on my iPod... none of them worked. They would show up in the "Movies" list, but when you hit play, it would just play the audio, and show a still from the movie as "album art". I fucked with these movies in every way I knew how to fuck with them, and it wasn't until I put a movie back on there that I knew had worked in the past and the same thing happened, that I decided the problem WASN'T with the Google videos... it was with the iPod. I eventually did a full reformat and reloaded everything and it all works fine now... all the movies play normally. I suspect the problem was related to the fact that I was manually managing the contents on the thing by connecting it to TWO different Macs, which it appears not to like very much. So I'm gonna have to rethink all my music-library-management plans.
I spent an equal amount of time fucking with the TiVo and copying videos off of that (download from TiVo to PC, process videos to mpeg2, ftp to iBook, burn to firewire drive) only to find that two of the shows I recorded were nothing but an hour of blackness, due to a problem we have with our bedroom cablebox intermittently and inexplicably shutting itself off. Fuck. And one of them isn't due to be shown again any time in the near future. It was for my class, too. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.
Speaking of movies... I also figured out how to use the programs MacTheRipper and DVD2OneX to do things to DVDs that one really should not be doing to DVDs, unless one is backing up one's own store-bought DVD collection for safekeeping. Which is of course all I would ever use it for. Welcome, visitors from the MPAA, FBI, and Interpol!! (Is it me, or are videos with the Interpol warning just inherently scarier than the FBI warning? Like, if you copy a video from Europe they send some '00-level agents out after your ass.) This DVD2One program is like magic. It puts a full length DVD movie onto a SINGLE regular 4.3 gig disc, which means it must be compressing the video quite a bit, but really... I couldn't tell. Of course, the video I copied was March of the Penguins, which you could replace with a blank white screen for half the film without affecting the overall impression. Anyway. It works.
Speaking of work... I should do some, so I think I'll put an end to this. And put some headphones on to drown out the snoring fucker behind me.
Oh... speaking of irritating fuckers... one more thing... the "what to blog about" book claims that you should try not to always bitch and moan and complain about stuff in your blog all the time, because nobody wants to read a blog written by a grouchy old curmudgeon every day. That's not true, readers... is it?? IS IT???
Sunday, October 29
dave is shilling for apple again...
For those of you with kids and teens thinking about Xmas... Apple is clearing out their refurbished last-generation iPod Shuffles for dirt cheap. I just bought my 7-year-old one of the 1/2 gig models for $29. ($36 with tax and shipping). The 120 song capacity won't satisfy a real music buff, but if you want your elementary or middle schooler to be the only kid on the bus with a real iPod... this is a pretty amazing price.
(The 1 gig shuffle is going for $59)
For those of you with kids and teens thinking about Xmas... Apple is clearing out their refurbished last-generation iPod Shuffles for dirt cheap. I just bought my 7-year-old one of the 1/2 gig models for $29. ($36 with tax and shipping). The 120 song capacity won't satisfy a real music buff, but if you want your elementary or middle schooler to be the only kid on the bus with a real iPod... this is a pretty amazing price.
(The 1 gig shuffle is going for $59)
I'll be kinda depressed-sounding for christmas...
So, I love Aimee Mann. My enjoyment of her music runs back to "Voices Carry" and all the way up to her latest few albums. In fact, I just received one of her concerts in the mail via Netflix. I recently decided that she is one of those singers who I just enjoy on a purely timbral level... that she could sing pretty much anything and I would find it enjoyable just because I enjoy the sound of her voice so much. I thought.
So...
Q: Is there any type of music that Aimee Mann could sing that would NOT be an enjoyable experience?
A: Umm... Christmas Carols?
Ick.
So, I love Aimee Mann. My enjoyment of her music runs back to "Voices Carry" and all the way up to her latest few albums. In fact, I just received one of her concerts in the mail via Netflix. I recently decided that she is one of those singers who I just enjoy on a purely timbral level... that she could sing pretty much anything and I would find it enjoyable just because I enjoy the sound of her voice so much. I thought.
So...
Q: Is there any type of music that Aimee Mann could sing that would NOT be an enjoyable experience?
A: Umm... Christmas Carols?
Ick.
Saturday, October 28
NaNonFicMo...
You have all no doubt heard of NaNoWriMo, and perhaps even the newly minted NaBloPoMo, but if you're like me... none of these endeavors really appeals to you. I already post in my blog almost every day already, and I don't exactly feel like I have a NOVEL in me trying to get out. But it occurred to me last year... why should the budding FICTION authors get all the inspiration?
How about if all of us science and academic types take the "novel" out of NaNo and spend November working on that first textbook or collection of essays or those papers and articles that have been sitting around unwritten inside our heads for a few years. How nice would it be to take 20 - 30 minutes a day to just sit and TYPE, and to have 30,000 - 50,000 words to show for it by December 1st?
Who's with me? Should I start working on a logo?
You have all no doubt heard of NaNoWriMo, and perhaps even the newly minted NaBloPoMo, but if you're like me... none of these endeavors really appeals to you. I already post in my blog almost every day already, and I don't exactly feel like I have a NOVEL in me trying to get out. But it occurred to me last year... why should the budding FICTION authors get all the inspiration?
How about if all of us science and academic types take the "novel" out of NaNo and spend November working on that first textbook or collection of essays or those papers and articles that have been sitting around unwritten inside our heads for a few years. How nice would it be to take 20 - 30 minutes a day to just sit and TYPE, and to have 30,000 - 50,000 words to show for it by December 1st?
Who's with me? Should I start working on a logo?
Friday, October 27
speaking of white space...
I noticed for the first time the other day that the text on this blog is all crampy. When there is a descender on one line and an ascender below it, the two characters actually TOUCH. I checked the template, and sure enough, the "line height" for the main text was set to 100%. I increased that to 120% to give a little more breathing room around the words. Hopefully the change improves the readability a bit.
Do I have better things to do today than "sprucing up" the blog? What do YOU think...?
I noticed for the first time the other day that the text on this blog is all crampy. When there is a descender on one line and an ascender below it, the two characters actually TOUCH. I checked the template, and sure enough, the "line height" for the main text was set to 100%. I increased that to 120% to give a little more breathing room around the words. Hopefully the change improves the readability a bit.
Do I have better things to do today than "sprucing up" the blog? What do YOU think...?
sparse, but gets the gears turning...
The book I mentioned in yesterday's post is called No One Cares What You Had For Lunch, by Maggie "Mighty Girl" Mason. I picked it up while I was at B&N, without really flipping through it. Had I flipped though it, the formatting might have caused me to put it back down. The subtitle - "100 Ideas for Your Blog" is to be taken literally... there are exactly 100 ideas here, one per page, in list format. So since some of the ideas are kind of short, there is a LOT of white space! I don't know what I expected... I guess I expected a more narrative, book-like approach.
Anyway, despite the fact that the whole book could probably easily be packed into about 30 pages, some of the ideas were really good to read. And not even because I intend to use *exactly* those ideas, but because they got me thinking about similar ideas, or just thinking about what the blog has been lacking lately. For example, one suggestion is to write about something you collect, and why, and all that. And it got me to thinking about my guitars, which I own a dozen or so of. And it occurred to me that a list of my dozen guitars would be interesting only to guitarists, but every one of them has a story... a biography that could be written about it. Each one means something different to ME, which is why I can't get rid of any of them, and why an essay about each of them would make for good blog reading. So I've written three episodes of that and I'll let it leak out slowly over the next few months.
It also convinced me to add more personal touches to the blog. Last night I decided to try a new feature where I would pick up my guitar and improvise for 60 seconds and post that to the blog every week or so. Not that it will be any good or polished or finished... it might suck most of the time. But it will be more ME than almost anything I could write in words.
So. I'm not sure the book is worth $15, considering all the content could fit into a few lengthy blog posts, but it got me thinking, and if this blog gets a tiny bit better because of that... maybe it WAS worth it.
The book I mentioned in yesterday's post is called No One Cares What You Had For Lunch, by Maggie "Mighty Girl" Mason. I picked it up while I was at B&N, without really flipping through it. Had I flipped though it, the formatting might have caused me to put it back down. The subtitle - "100 Ideas for Your Blog" is to be taken literally... there are exactly 100 ideas here, one per page, in list format. So since some of the ideas are kind of short, there is a LOT of white space! I don't know what I expected... I guess I expected a more narrative, book-like approach.
Anyway, despite the fact that the whole book could probably easily be packed into about 30 pages, some of the ideas were really good to read. And not even because I intend to use *exactly* those ideas, but because they got me thinking about similar ideas, or just thinking about what the blog has been lacking lately. For example, one suggestion is to write about something you collect, and why, and all that. And it got me to thinking about my guitars, which I own a dozen or so of. And it occurred to me that a list of my dozen guitars would be interesting only to guitarists, but every one of them has a story... a biography that could be written about it. Each one means something different to ME, which is why I can't get rid of any of them, and why an essay about each of them would make for good blog reading. So I've written three episodes of that and I'll let it leak out slowly over the next few months.
It also convinced me to add more personal touches to the blog. Last night I decided to try a new feature where I would pick up my guitar and improvise for 60 seconds and post that to the blog every week or so. Not that it will be any good or polished or finished... it might suck most of the time. But it will be more ME than almost anything I could write in words.
So. I'm not sure the book is worth $15, considering all the content could fit into a few lengthy blog posts, but it got me thinking, and if this blog gets a tiny bit better because of that... maybe it WAS worth it.
Thursday, October 26
what size do those "Emily the Strange" t-shirts start in...?
I was getting ready to leave for work this morning and I spotted this drawing in one of my daughter's open school notebooks...
I'm not sure what to make of it. Isn't 7 years old a little young to be getting this "goth". (The text reads - "Belongs to dark woman.")
The "glyphs" are just.... creepy.
I was getting ready to leave for work this morning and I spotted this drawing in one of my daughter's open school notebooks...
I'm not sure what to make of it. Isn't 7 years old a little young to be getting this "goth". (The text reads - "Belongs to dark woman.")
The "glyphs" are just.... creepy.
"i need two 50 watt halogen par-30 floods at 112 E. 23rd street... STAT!!!"
A saw an Asian guy this morning heading uptown carrying one of those big extendible light-bulb-changing poles and pulling a small rolling suitcase. He seemed to be in a hurry. Do rich people in Manhattan really employ emergency light-bulb-changing-and-delivery services?? How much do you think such a thing costs?
A saw an Asian guy this morning heading uptown carrying one of those big extendible light-bulb-changing poles and pulling a small rolling suitcase. He seemed to be in a hurry. Do rich people in Manhattan really employ emergency light-bulb-changing-and-delivery services?? How much do you think such a thing costs?
i don't know what my problem is...
... but I can't seem to wake up when I want to anymore. I set the alarm for 5:20 and I wake up at 6:05 and the alarm is turned off and I honestly don't remember doing it. It's kinda freaking me out. Plus I'm always getting to school later than I intend to. It makes me feel like a loser.
I need to decide what I'm doing this morning. Sometimes on Thursdays I take it the train a few stops past work and hang at the B&N for a while. I could grade papers. But I also really need to plan a lesson today for physics class. The midterm is over and it's time to start a new topic and I really haven't given loads of thought to how I'm going to introduce it. I usually enjoy midterm... both my physics and astronomy classes move from the basic stuff to more interesting stuff, but this semester... I dunno... I don't think either class is going particularly well. The changes I tried to make to the physics class kind of backfired, and the astro class feels pretty phoned-in.
Some blogger recently wrote a book about what to blog about when you can't think of anything to blog about. I think I may need to look for this book. I feel a certain lack of inspiration. Any requests?
... but I can't seem to wake up when I want to anymore. I set the alarm for 5:20 and I wake up at 6:05 and the alarm is turned off and I honestly don't remember doing it. It's kinda freaking me out. Plus I'm always getting to school later than I intend to. It makes me feel like a loser.
I need to decide what I'm doing this morning. Sometimes on Thursdays I take it the train a few stops past work and hang at the B&N for a while. I could grade papers. But I also really need to plan a lesson today for physics class. The midterm is over and it's time to start a new topic and I really haven't given loads of thought to how I'm going to introduce it. I usually enjoy midterm... both my physics and astronomy classes move from the basic stuff to more interesting stuff, but this semester... I dunno... I don't think either class is going particularly well. The changes I tried to make to the physics class kind of backfired, and the astro class feels pretty phoned-in.
Ok... here is glimpse into my "process". I got freaked out just now about not knowing how I was going to fill the class today, so I took 10 minutes to write up a set of classnotes for the day. These are them.Huygens - mv^2 is conserved. What's that all about?
Mess with kinematics equations. Look for v^2. Hand wave until you come up with 1/2mv^2=mgh.
Talk about two sides of equation. On one side, an object "has height" on the other it "has velocity". You can kinda think of it as one kind of thing changing into another.
Define the mgh side as "Work". Coin term "energy".
Energy is a familiar term - do brainstorming "types of energy" activity.
Energy is conserved - transformed. Total E in universe constant as it changes forms.
Define energy more precisely as "capacity to do work".
Types of energy seem very different, perhaps even "abstract". What IS energy? Play Feynman audio lecture.
Read Bacon for HW?
If leftover time, do some roller-coaster-type energy conservation problems.
That is as organized as you will ever see me get.)
Some blogger recently wrote a book about what to blog about when you can't think of anything to blog about. I think I may need to look for this book. I feel a certain lack of inspiration. Any requests?
Wednesday, October 25
i should know better...
...than to blog about what an awesome day I had, because today is starting out just the opposite. I woke up late... too late to catch the train I wanted, with barely enough time to catch the 6:43 if I hurry. I rush out the door and drive slightly faster than usual until I get about a mile from the intersection with the country road that leads to the train station and it is CLOSED. Fire or something, the cop wasn't very clear. Now you have to understand, the train station I go to is in the middle of NOWHERE. I have no idea how to get around this roadblock. I only know one other route to the station and that involves going about 3/4 of the way back home, and then around in this big circle... and I don't really know the roads, so I had to stop at a gas station and buy a fucking $5 map...
Needless to say, I did NOT catch the 6:43. So I'm on the 7:31, which gets in a little later than I like when I have a morning class, but I'm going to try to roll with it. We'll see if there are any more inconveniences awaiting me today.
As for now, I'm gonna grade astronomy homeworks.
...than to blog about what an awesome day I had, because today is starting out just the opposite. I woke up late... too late to catch the train I wanted, with barely enough time to catch the 6:43 if I hurry. I rush out the door and drive slightly faster than usual until I get about a mile from the intersection with the country road that leads to the train station and it is CLOSED. Fire or something, the cop wasn't very clear. Now you have to understand, the train station I go to is in the middle of NOWHERE. I have no idea how to get around this roadblock. I only know one other route to the station and that involves going about 3/4 of the way back home, and then around in this big circle... and I don't really know the roads, so I had to stop at a gas station and buy a fucking $5 map...
Needless to say, I did NOT catch the 6:43. So I'm on the 7:31, which gets in a little later than I like when I have a morning class, but I'm going to try to roll with it. We'll see if there are any more inconveniences awaiting me today.
As for now, I'm gonna grade astronomy homeworks.
Tuesday, October 24
readers speak... dr. dave listens...
(... eventually.)
A few people blamed RSS feeds for the steadily decreasing readership of the blog, but I don't buy it. By my count, only 15 people access the Bloglines feed, and not too many more are using other readers, I wouldn't guess. Besides, I only publish a partial feed, which means that the RSS people should have to click through to the page anyway. If they are reading that is.
And then a few OTHER people took the opportunity to hassle me for not offering a full-text RSS feed. It isn't the first time. So, in the name of keeping my dwindling readership appeased, let it be known that "second order approximation" is now available as a full-text RSS feed.
Spread the word. And quit yer bitchin'.
(... eventually.)
A few people blamed RSS feeds for the steadily decreasing readership of the blog, but I don't buy it. By my count, only 15 people access the Bloglines feed, and not too many more are using other readers, I wouldn't guess. Besides, I only publish a partial feed, which means that the RSS people should have to click through to the page anyway. If they are reading that is.
And then a few OTHER people took the opportunity to hassle me for not offering a full-text RSS feed. It isn't the first time. So, in the name of keeping my dwindling readership appeased, let it be known that "second order approximation" is now available as a full-text RSS feed.
Spread the word. And quit yer bitchin'.
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